Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes

With summer approaching and everyone screaming for ice cream I thought it would be fun to do a ice cream cone cupcake. This is teacher appreciation week at our school so I thought it would be fun for the kids to give to their teachers. The teachers are my guinea pigs a lot for my new recipes, but this year I've not gotten to bake as much as usual. I'll blame it on my 5th grader and how busy she has kept me :) I'm sure it has nothing to do with the amount of subbing I've done, trained for and run a half-marathon, constant soccer Saturdays for both kids, and of course most recently making a colonial dress for that fabulous 5th grader!

A lot of times if I am making a cute or a decorated cupcake, I will just start with a cake mix. It saves a lot of time (and probably money) to just start with that. I used the Pillsbury Classic White cake mix that is really quite tasty and I made it according to package directions.

I placed my cones in my cupcake pan and I filled them pretty full. I didn't know how they would turn out, so I just did half my batter until I knew how they would rise in the ice cream cones.

Batter filled to nearly the top

I started these at 350 for 20 minutes (that's what how I normally do my cupcakes. This probably took closer to 25 minutes. Some of them rose nicely, others spilled over and were kind of ugly (but seriously aren't cupcakes like babies, there are no ugly ones!) For my next dozen I didn't fill them as full and it was a little better.

Some are good, but I chose on my next batch not to fill as full.

I don't generally use "store-bought" icing, but I was on a time crunch today and I had some available. To me the "store-bought" icing doesn't have the right consistency for doing the cupcake swirl. For whatever reason though I have always found that chocolate "store-bought" icing seems a bit stiffer and I will use that on occasion.  I also could not find my correct tips, so I improvised on that as well (with the purple icing) and I just cut a zigzag pattern on my pastry bag at the end where a tip would be. I did eventually find a tip that worked OK when I did the chocolate icing.

By adding less batter, it didn't quite fill as much as I wanted

Below is my end result with the sprinkles that came with the icing.

This was totally an experiment. I think in the future I just might make sure I have time to make some homemade icing AND the right tips, but I'm sure I will be doing these again.