Spumoni Cupcakes

When I recently saw some Neopolitan vegan ice cream in the freezer, it made me realize how much I used to love spumoni ice cream. Then it hit me: we had pistachio butter we’d bought in Portland, and I could make spumoni cupcakes instead.

The basic concept was to make three kinds of cupcake batter (a 1/3 recipe of each) then layer them into the cupcake pan (note that the original colors were actually green and red as they should be, despite what they turned into after baking):

The recipes we used were the basic chocolate cupcake from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (unmodified), a modified version of Peanut Butter Cupcakes from the same book (but we substituted the pistachio butter for the peanut butter, and agave for molasses), and a modified version of Strawberry Cupcakes form the Joy of Vegan Baking (but instead of strawberries, we took about 2/3 cup of frozen cherries, thawed and pureed).

Since in the end the chocolate was the strongest flavor, we decided to make pistachio and cherry buttercream. I thought they were pretty good, but not worth the effort (and the cherry flavor was never really strong enough). Sarah thought they were just mediocre. It was fun to change it up though!