Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes

On the 4th, we had another birthday celebration for Wiley, and this time for his dad, too. When I asked Wiley what color of birthday cake he wanted, he said without any hesitation, "Pink." His mom told me later that he spent a week going through a "pink" phase, asking for everything pink! Why not, it's a great color! Definitely one of my favorites!

I bought a Wilton Ice Cream Cone Cake Pan a while back that I have been looking for an opportunity to use, so I decided that this was the perfect opportunity!

Now a view outside the box:

I'm not usually a cake mix user, but I'm not opposed to them if the situation and schedule need it, so I decided it would be easier and less time consuming to buy a pink cake mix rather than make one from scratch. I chose a Pillsbury strawberry cake mix. I though that the ice cream cone cakes would be even cuter with two separate flavors/colors, so I bought a Pillsbury devil's food cake mix too.
 

According to the box, each mix would make 24 regular cupcakes and between the two mixes, it made 12 cone bottoms and 12 ice cream tops. The cake pan made three trips into the oven to bake all of these:

The first step after baking and cooling is to cut the excess cake off to make them level so that they don't tip over! 

The last batch was a little short on batter so I ended up with two "baby" cones which worked out better for the two boys. I thought the swirls on the cone top were really cute and I hated to cover them up with frosting.

I tried to make the swirls with the frosting, which also came out of a can.

I was happy with how they turned out. Next time I will be more liberal with the sprinkles. My thought in the beginning was that they looked cute with the sprinkles right on the tip top. As I progressed, I started adding more because after all, aren't cupcakes all about the sprinkles? Especially for kids? By the time I came to this conclusion, and went back to add more, the frosting had already set up and the sprinkles just rolled right off! Oh well, I still thought they were cute!

  It was a two-napkin treat, but everyone enjoyed eating them in spite of their messiness!

Especially this little guy!