Adorable Ice Cream Cupcakes
I wish I could take credit for such a cute, original idea as these ice cream cone cupcakes, but I can’t. The idea for these fun cupcakes was first introduced to me as a kid via the side of a Pillsbury box and my mom made them often. Today I’m bringing them back to life, homemade-style! We’re using my vanilla cake batter and cream cheese frosting for a soft serve ice cream look that will a make everyone do a double take! I know what you’re thinking, but please don’t be intimidated by that tall, two-tone icing swirl. My recipe keeps things super simple by making one batch of frosting and then flavoring half of it with cocoa powder, rather than making two separate flavors. Not only is it easy to make the two icings this way, it’s also shockingly easy to achieve the pretty swirl–more on this below. Save these for summer parties (my watermelon sugar cookies are always a hit too!) or an ice cream themed birthday party, alongside my ice cream cake, of course!
What You Need
These carefully selected ingredients make my recipe the BEST one out there! Here are a few worth noting before we get started:
Buttermilk. I love using buttermilk in cakes for tenderness, moisture, and flavor. If you don’t have any on hand, use my easy buttermilk substitute. Butter & oil. If you’ve made any of my cakes before (like my yellow cake) then you know this combination provides the best flavor and moisture. Oil is great for adding moisture but lacks flavor. Butter is wonderful for flavor, but since it contains somewhere around 20% water, it can (ironically) make the cupcakes a bit dry. Using a blend of butter and oil balances the cake perfectly, giving us excellent flavor and moisture. You can use any neutral cooking oil, I have recently taken to using avocado oil. Cream cheese. Make sure to use brick-style, full-fat cream cheese for the frosting. Low-fat or tub-style will give you runny, messy results. Cocoa powder. Either natural or dutch-process cocoa will work for the chocolate portion of the frosting. Sprinkles. These are optional but highly recommended, of course! Use jimmies or quins; nonpareils will bleed into your batter.
SAM’S TIP: The final cupcakes are pretty tall, so make sure you have an equally tall storage container in mind before you make them. I use a tall, flat-topped cake carrier turned upside-down (so the lid acts as the bottom). Remember, this is just an overview of the ingredients I used and why. For the full recipe please scroll down to the bottom of the post!
How to Make Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes
Making the Cupcakes
Making the Frosting
SAM’S TIP: I recommend piping your icing on a paper plate before piping on your cupcakes. This will ensure that both frostings have worked their way down into the tip for that perfect swirl! If you’d like a visual of how I swirl the two frostings together, see the video in my peanut butter cupcakes post (where I swirl peanut butter and chocolate frosting). I don’t know about you, but I’d like all my cupcakes served in ice cream cones from now on, please 😉 Enjoy! Let’s bake together! I’ll be walking you through all the steps in my written recipe below! If you try this recipe, be sure to tag me on Instagram, and you can also find me on YouTube and Facebook This recipe was originally published 08/24/2015. It has been updated to make the recipe slightly more clear, to add helpful notes throughout the post, and to include a video tutorial.
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