Ice cream cone cakes

Believe it or not, these are cupcakes!

The ice cream cone is a real wafer cone that I bought, and there is cake baked right inside the cone. The 'ice cream' on the top is actually frosting! And you can't have an ice cream cone without a Cadbury's Flake!

I made them for my boyfriend's dad's 70th birthday party last summer. I was asked to make cupcakes but wanted to do something a bit different and that would work for a summer party. These are a lot easier to make than they look, and I had several comments about how cute they looked and people saying they had never seen anything like it before.

The recipe comes from "Eat Me!" by Xanthe Milton. I have adapted it slightly so here is the recipe I used.

110g unsalted butter, room temperature
110g caster sugar
3 eggs
110g self-raising flour
1tsp baking powder
1tsp vanilla essence
12 flat-based ice cream cones
3 or 4 Cadburys chocolate flakes

For the icing:

225g butter or marg, room temperature
450g icing sugar
2tsp vanilla essence

a few drops of food colouring

Method

1. First of all, it's really important that you get ice cream cones with flat bottoms. Most are pointed (as you will remember from childhood); but you need them flat so they will stand up in the baking tray. I tried three supermarkets before I found some, made by Askey's - which my local Tesco and Sainsbury's didn't have, but I found them in Iceland. That's why mums go to Iceland!

2. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/gas 4. The original recipe tells you to cut squares of tin foil and place them in the holes of a muffin tin. Place the ice cream cone in each piece of foil and wrap the foil around the cone. However I'm lazy and was in a hurry, and had come across a similar recipe that didn't say to do this, so I didn't bother. It made no difference at all - either to the cooking or keeping the cones upright.

3. Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one, at a time. Sift the flour and baking powder together and add this a third at a time to the batter. Add the vanilla.

4. Spoon the mixture into the cones, filling to just below the top of the cone. Place in the centre of the oven and bake for about 20 mins. Place on a wire rack and leave to cool.

5. Make the icing. Beat the butter so that it is pale and creamy and add the icing sugar and the vanilla. Separate into a couple of batches and add a little food colouring to each - I found a few drops of green gave a pale mint colour which worked well. Pink also looked nice.

6. Using a piping bag with a star-shaped nozzle, pipe the icing onto the cupcakes. Add a chocolate flake to each. I also tried to add hundreds and thousands but they didn't adhere to the icing and just fell off!

I think these would be great for children's parties though adults love them as well! You could also make a different type of cake to go inside the cones; it doesn't have to be vanilla. Maybe a strawberry cake to go with the pink icing and a mint chocolate cake to go with the green icing?

I am sending these in to Calendar Cakes, hosted by Rachel of Dolly Bakes and Laura of Laura Loves Cakes, as their theme for August is "British summertime". Yes, I probably should have made some sort of wet weather cake featuring mini umbrellas, but I'm optimistic (and about to head off to Majorca so the rubbish weather here doesn't matter!). But what says summer time more than ice cream...?

I am also sending them to Hoosier Homemade's Cupcake Tuesday weekly link-up.

Finally I am also sending this to Bake Fest, hosted by Foodmania - a roundup of vegetarian baked recipes blogged during August.

I am also updating this (March 2013) to send to Alphabakes as this month's letter is I.