Recipe FAIL- Dr. Seuss Disaster Cake

Last Saturday was Dr. Seuss's birthday, and I thought it would be fun to make a crazy cake to celebrate.  (plus, I've been having cake withdrawals since I went off dairy and I wanted to try making dairy free frosting...)

Turns out, some brands and flavors of boxed cake mixes are dairy free, so I thought I'd just use one of those, and focus my experimental energy on the frosting.  I used a Western Family yellow cake mix, and after mixing it all together, separated it into 3 bowls and dyed one reddish-orange, dyed one green, and one blue (leaving the original yellow color in the mixing bowl).  Then I poured the yellow and red into one 6" cake pan, and the blue and green into the other.  I thought using 6" cake pan would make it extra tall and funny-looking... kinda Dr. Seussy, right?

Le Sigh.

I guess I didn't Pam & flour my pans well enough because neither one came out very cleanly, and almost ALL of the yellow part of the yellow/red cake got stuck in.  Oh well, I thought.  Nothing a little frosting couldn't fix, right?

On to the frosting...  I should preface this with the fact that I never use a recipe when I make butter cream frosting... Just a stick of butter, at room temp, a smidge of milk, a tich of vanilla, and add powdered sugar until the consistency is good.  easy peasy.  So I thought I'd do the same, but sub all the dairy ingredients for non-dairy ones.

Long story short, I used a combination of coconut cream and Earth Balance Soy Spread, instead of butter (but the soy spread was not at room temp...) and I think I accidentally added too much coconut milk.  I could NOT get the frosting to have a thick enough consistency and had to add way too much powdered sugar.  The frosting tasted almost like pure sugar and so I stopped.

I started frosting the cake (which was ever so slightly still warm. BIG mistake) and it soon became obvious that the cake with a large chunk missing from its bottom was not going to stay put!  The frosting acted like more of a lubricant and the two layers were just sliding all over the place.  I decided to stick some BBQ skewers into the two layers to hold them in place, and put the cake in the cold garage to set-up before I finished frosting it.  Next time I went to check on the cake, it looked like this.

 Oh well.  I tried to cut up a piece as nice as I could so I could get a feel for what it WOULD have looked like had I not been so impatient and used a recipe for frosting.

It did taste ok, but the frosting was too sweet for Jay and I.  I have never failed so miserably on a cake before.  (except maybe that time I tried angel food cake 3 times and it fell apart while cooling all. 3. times.)