Ice cream cone cupcakes

Sorry, I know I've had a lot of cupcake posts lately, but I got a cupcake book for my birthday, and the recipes are just too tempting. I also recently volunteered to make all the cupcakes for Addison's class' last day of school (I really wanted the excuse to make the cupcakes but not feel guilty eating them). I thought these would be perfect for a group of 40+ preschool/kindergarteners, but I wanted to test out the ease of the recipe and see if my kids would actually follow through and finish the cake and cone.

Since this was a test, I just used a yellow cake mix (I am trying to stay away from anything in a box now).

Preheat oven to 350'. I covered over my loaf pans with aluminum foil and used a bamboo skewer to poke holes in the top, then gently placed cones in so the bottom barely touched the bottom of the pan. I was able to get 10 cones in each pan. I baked for exactly 18 minutes and they came out perfectly. Here are the cones before baking and in the front, you can see the hole I poked for the last cone:



For the icing, I started with 1 stick of butter (1/2 cup), and added about 1 cup confectioner's sugar and 1 1/2 tsp vanilla. I mixed this really well with my paddle attachment. Then, I removed about 1/3 of the mixture - I wanted to make strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla icing. I put another 1 1/2 cup confectioner's sugar in the mixer and about 3 TBSP milk, and let it mix again. Meanwhile, I pureed 5 strawberries and added them to the bowl of icing I removed. I mixed and added about 3/4 cup confectioner's sugar. It was too runny, which is why you don't see it in the photos, tasted great, but could not swirl it on- probably should have just used 2.5 strawberries.

Back to the icing in the mixer, I removed half the vanilla icing, added 1/4 cup cocoa powder (Hershey's) to it, mixed, and added enough milk for the desired consistency.

Using my Pampered chef decorator, I started with the vanilla icing, then added about 2 TBSP chocolate and scraped it to the side of the inside of the decorator, and then added 2 TBSP vanilla to the other side and when I pushed it out, it swirled beautifully. I finished the remaining chocolate on the rest of the cones.

Finished:



Enjoying:





Results: All cones, cake, and icing EATEN! Now, to figure out how to transport them to the school....