We took the idea from here. It's not a vegan cake: I had some eggs left that I had to buy for a protocol I'm using at work, so we used them up. The frosting is the coconut oil based frosting I've used before.
Cake Mix:
3 cups plain flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 sticks (1 cup) softened (fake) butter
2 1/3 cups sugar
4 eggs
2 tsp vanilla essence
~1 cup coconut milk beverage (add more or less to get a good consistency)
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet gel food colouring
Frosting:
2 cups coconut oil
~5 cups icing sugar
1 tsp lemon juice
~2 tbsp coconut milk beverage
Decoration:
multicoloured sprinkles
squiggly, brightly coloured candles
a sparkler
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease seven 9 inch cake tins (we had 4 tins, so did one round of 4 and another of 3), and sprinkle with flour. Mix the baking powder and salt with a fork in a medium sized bowl. In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs and mix. Add the vanilla and mix. Alternately add the flour mixture and milk starting with the flour. Check for good dropping consistency and add more liquid or flour if required.
Split the mixture equally between seven smallish bowls. Add each colour of food colouring to a different bowl, mixing thoroughly. Then transfer each mixture to a separate prepared cake tin. Smooth out. Bake for about 15 min, until the cake comes away from the edge and a skewer comes out clean. Repeat until all cakes are done. Move the cakes to a cooling rack and leave until cool. Refrigerate until needed (the coldness may help with stability during assembly).
Prepare the frosting: beat together the ingredients gradually until a good consistency is reached. Note that the melting point of coconut oil is right around room temperature, so consistency can be very sensitive to temperature.
To assemble, place the violet layer on a plate, cover with icing, then add the indigo layer. Repeat with the blue, green, yellow, orange and red layers, being careful to keep it in a straight stack. Note, to keep the top straight it may be a good idea to invert the red layer on top (we forgot to do this and it wasn't noticeable though). Cover the top and sides with remaining icing - the idea is to make a smooth white outside to hide any hint of a rainbow. We were actually a little short on frosting, for looks - for taste it was plenty enough. Scatter multicoloured sprinkles on top. Chill (we just put it in a very chilly outer room of the big house). Before serving, remove from chiller and arrange candles around the outside / sparkler in the middle.
The whiteness and stability of the cake and icing mixtures are really important. The gel colours (which are key - liquid food colours won't do this) combined with a white cake mix make the the layers really bright. And the white icing really sets the colours off - coconut oil is whiter than butter, so the coconut icing was perfect. I'm kind of glad we didn't attempt a completely vegan cake as I think the eggs are probably important for the cake stability, which is important for making a neat stack and for getting a clean, beautiful cut. It would probably be possible, but might require experimenting and optimising the cake mix recipe.
The coconut icing also gave it some flavour interest: with butter icing it would have been visually amazing but relatively dull in taste. The frosting was a little short to get a perfect finish on the outside, although this wasn't so noticeable by the time it was decorated - for a smooth exterior more would have been necessary (although it already felt like loads when eating it).
It is an amazing, epic, huge cake: each slice is seven layers deep so there's a lot of cake and a lot of frosting... and a lot of awesomeness!
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