I made some cute ice cream cone cupcakes for a work baby shower today, and, oh my goodness, they were tricky!

I started off by reading this post over at House of Hepworths, and mourned for a moment that I didn't have a foil pan I could use to keep the cones upright while baking… I had thought I could just stick cones in my cupcake tins, but the cones are way smaller than I thought!

I ended up doing something different, and somewhat (I think) clever: I rolled up aluminum foil and packed the cones into the tins, to help them stay up.

(I pinched the foil towards the cones to help them stay up.)

Something I had heard about, and remembered from reading the House of Hepworths post, was using an icing bag to fill cupcakes. Clover, right! Well, it may be clever but I am not, because it made way more mess than just using a spoon:

Also, Public Service Announcement time! This is too full:

Because then your cupcakes will look like this:

Yeah… I ended up salvaging most of the cupcakes by using a table knife and scraping off the extra cupcake. It's workable, but it won't win any beauty pageants.

The other problem I ran in to was how to get them to stand up and transport nicely once they were baked and frosted… The cone gets soft in the oven (which I never thought about) so they all can't necessarily be classified as "upright" after baking. I tried shoving them all into my cake carrier, but then when I opened the lid to check on them, two cupcakes fell out… d'oh! And then another fell on the floor when I was trying to move them into the Pyrex. I was not looking forward to having to carry these out to the car, let alone drive to work!

Luckily, I thought of a solution as I was falling asleep last night… I took two cereal boxes that were almost empty, turned them on their side, and started cutting holes for the cupcakes. Then my would-be engineer Husband walks in, and suggests cutting an "x" instead of circles… brilliant! Check out this engineering marvel:

They're very cute, and I got several compliments on them, but I don't think I will make them again unless specifically requested. And if you decide to, here's a summary of things you will want to know before starting:

• Get one of those foil trays to cut holes in. If you don't have time/money/energy to do so, have your cereal box holders ready as soon as the cupcakes are ready to come out of the pan. This would have prevented much grief.
• If you're using my foil trick for baking, know that you will use a lot of foil… You don't want to run out halfway through with the oven preheated!
• Don't fill the cones 2/3, like usual… only fill them halfway. I promise. Cross my heart.
• And speaking of filling the cones, if you want to use the pastry bag trick, make sure you know what you're doing. For some reason, I wasn't expecting it to be so runny!
• The cones will get soft and squishy!
• If you're going to fill them, I suggesting using frosting, and then doing not a lot of frosting on top. That way you have a better cake-to-frosting ratio in each bite.
• Sprinkles are cute.

Good luck!