• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Have ready 3 greased and floured 9-inch round cake pans.
• Prepare the chocolate cake first. In a mixing bowl, stir together flour through cocoa powder. Add the oil, milk, egg, vanilla and stir until well mixed. Stir in the boiling water or coffee. Beat with an electric mixer for about 30 to 60 seconds or until smooth, then pour into the pan. Bake for about 30 minutes. Let cool in pan for 10 minutes, then invert onto a rack and let cool completely.
• While chocolate cake bakes, wash out the mixing bowl and beaters and start preparing the vanilla batter.
• First, weigh the mixing bowl so you'll be able to weigh it with batter and estimate the weight of the batter.
• Mix the flour, baking powder and salt together and set aside.
• With an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating for 30 seconds after each egg, then beat in the vanilla.
• With a big spoon or a heavy duty scraper, add the flour and milk alternately, beginning and ending with the flour. Beat on low speed until smooth. You should have about 5 ½ to 6 cups of batter, which you will divide in half.
• At this point, you can use weights so that you can precisely measure how much vanilla batter to add to the strawberry mix-ins OR you can just eyeball it and add about 2 ¾ cups of vanilla batter to the strawberry mix-ins.
• To make the strawberry batter, put the gelatin powder in a second mixing bowl. Stir in just ¾ cup of the vanilla batter and the strawberry extract to make a very concentrated red batter, then stir in 2 cups of vanilla batter so you have half vanilla batter and half strawberry batter.
• Put the batter in the two cake pans and bake at 350 for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out with moist crumbs. Let cool in the pans for 10 minutes, then invert and let cool completely.
• To assemble, frost and stack the cakes so that the chocolate is on the bottom, vanilla is in the center and strawberry is on top. Or stack it the way you want. It's not like I'm the queen of everything and you have to follow orders.

Frosting

• Beat 3 sticks (12 oz) softened unsalted butter until smooth and creamy.
• Gradually add 4 ½ cups of powdered sugar alternatively with the half & half or cream, stirring until mixture holds together. Add the salt and vanilla.
• Continue beating and scraping sides of bowl, adding whole milk as needed, until mixture is smooth and creamy.
• For a sweeter frosting, add a little more powdered sugar and milk.