Another year, another birthday cake creation

It was no Mickey Mouse cake like last year, but I think it was still a pretty cool creation.

For Austin's birthday party this year, I baked ice cream cone cupcakes -- that is cupcakes in ice cream cones.

The idea came from a cake recipe I came across -- although I ended up just taking the idea and using a cake mix. And a good thing I did, because I had to make them twice. Because I discovered that unlike regular cupcakes, which just rise and rise and rise when you bake them -- these rose until they overflowed and spilled down the side of the cones. So batch number one sort of, um, exploded in the oven. (I wish I'd thought to take a picture of the mutant ones.)

So, it was off to the grocery store for another cake mix, more cones and trial number two.

This time, I was smarter -- I baked just three cupcake cones, filled to three different heights to test how much (or how little) I needed to fill each one before they exploded. Turns out you don't need to fill them that much at all. Who knew?

So test run done, I baked up the rest and whipped up some chocolate and buttercream icing (for chocolate and vanilla ice cream, of course). I then used the biggest piping tip in the set I bought earlier in the week (yup, I actually bought a piping set) to pipe in the icing to look like ice cream.

I think they turned out pretty cool. And, aside from the exploded first batch, they weren't that hard to make.

And they were a hit with the critics.

Although not surprisingly, I was left with only vanilla ones...the chocolate ones were gobbled up.