How to Make Cake Balls That Look Like Ice Cream Cones

One day, as I was in the grocery store during the days when I was planning the Neapolitan ice cream April Fool's Day party, I saw Good Humor Drumsticks in the freezer case. Those classic, iconic ice cream confections always remind me of ice cream trucks and summers of my childhood.

I immediately knew I wanted to make something that looked like these time-honored treats for my dessert table. I toyed with a few ideas, but pretty quickly landed on cake balls made to look like miniature drumsticks.

But how to make them? I didn't think to Google for instructions, and find the number of creative people who have come up with a similar idea before I did. So this is what I figured out.

First, I needed to make the cones. I decided to make my own cones using my krumkake iron. I make krumkake, a thin, rolled cone cookie (kind of a Scandinavian pizelle) every year at Christmastime, and thought they'd make a delicious cone for my faux-Drumsticks.

First, I made my small cones. I didn't want the full sized cones, so I only used about half of the batter I usually do when making krumkake.

Next, I needed to roll the hot cookies into cone shapes before they cooled down. Krumkake irons come with a wooden rolling tool, but it's hard to get a good cone shape using just that classic tool. I needed one seriously pointy end, and a form with a more aggressive angle than the rolling tool. To that end, I used a large cake decorating icing tip as my basic form to create my ice cream cone shape.

Once I'd created the basic shape with the icing tip, I slipped it out, and inserted the krumkake roller. That worked perfectly to keep the cookie in its shape until it cooled down and hardened.

Next, I used a VERY sharp paring knife to trim off the excess cookie at the top of the cone, so I'd have a flat, normal looking miniature sugar cone, instead of a miniature waffle cone. It didn't work perfectly, but the jagged edges at the top get hidden in the cake ball anyway, so it wasn't a problem.

You all know how to make cake balls already, right? Cake truffles? Cake pops? Whatever you want to call them? Take baked cake scraps and trimmings, throw them in the mixer with something wet. Could be leftover icing. Could be a complimentaryliqueur. In this case, I used hazelnut flavored syrup I keep around the house for coffee. Add just enough wetness so that the cake becomes dough-like, and can be molded. That's your basic cake ball, and the possibilities are endless.

I scooped and rolled evenly sized cake balls first. Then I melted chocolate, and dipped the end of the cones in the chocolate and inserted them into the cake balls.

Once the chocolate hardened, I was able to dip the cake ball itself in melted chocolate and sprinkle with chopped peanuts.

I displayed the drumsticks in stemmed candle holders I found at Joann Fabrics, and nestled them in fake ice found in the floral department at Michael's.

Only after I'd already done these did I start to see adorable cake ball ice cream cones everywhere, it seems. I may have come up with the idea all on my own, but I certainly wasn't the first! Some of the other creative bloggers out there figured out how to use commercial ice cream cones for this project. I loved my homemade cones, but if I were to do it again, I think I'd spend some time over at Bakerella to see how she did it first!