Rainbow cake for a Sick Miss B

So Bella has come down with what we believe is the dreaded H1N1.....she looked at me this morning with those big green eyes and says...mom will you make me a vanilla cake with vanilla frosting? How could I say no???? Soooooooo here it is....with a twist....it is vanilla, but with COLOR!

I actually cut this recipe in half so that I was not swimming in cupcakes!!! It worked out pretty well although I still have problems coming up with 7/8 of a cup, so I just go a little bit shy of 1 cup of sugar!

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Double Vanilla Cupcakes from Amy Sedaris

* 1 ½ sticks (12 tbsp) unsalted butter, room temperature
* 1 ¾ cups of sugar
* 2 large eggs
* 2 Teaspoons of pure vanilla
* 1/2 Vanilla Bean, scraped (optional)
* ½ teaspoon of salt
* 2 ½ teaspoons of baking powder
* 2 ½ cups of flour
* 1 ¼ cups of milk

In a medium bowl, mix together salt, baking powder and flour. Stir to combine then set aside.

Cream butter and sugar together in a large bowl, then add in eggs, one at a time. Add vanilla extract and the seeds of half a vanilla bean. Beat until well combined.

Alternately add the dry ingredients and the milk to the butter/sugar mixture. Start with flour, end with flour.

*For Rainbow Cupcakes: Divide the batter into 6 bowls. Color your batter with food coloring (red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet). I used Americolor colors because they are more concentrated than the typical grocery store variety and the colors are intense without using a lot of it. For each bowl of color I only used about a nickel size amount of dye. If I had used liquid food dye, I would have had to use the entire bottle to get the colors that rich looking and it would have thinned the batter out too much. Each bottle was $1.80, but you only need the 3 primary colors to make the rainbow.

Spoon or pipe your batter in thin layers into the muffin cups, being careful not to mix the colors. I put my batter into Ziploc bags then I snipped the end of bag. When I was done, I just threw away the bag. No cleaning of pastry bags!

Bake at 375 degrees for 18-20 minutes for regular cupcakes and about 15 minutes for mini cupcakes.

Buttercream Frosting:

1 stick unsalted butter

1 Tablespoon milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 - 3 cups powdered sugar

Mix butter, milk, vanilla together, add powdered sugar. Start with 2 cups and see. Depends on how sweet you want your frosting.....I used just over 2 cups....I ended up adding a little more milk to help it to be more spreadable. Maybe a teaspoon more.