4th of July Cupcakes with Built-In Ice Cream Cones

4th of July cupcakes need red, white, and blue. But, 4th of July cupcakes (at least in St. Louis) are typically served on a HOT day and will need to compete with anything cold. So this year, my 4th of July cupcakes have a built in ice cream cone with bright red strawberry sorbet! The white comes from the frosting (I could have made the cake white, but went for yellow - close enough) and the blue comes from the sprinkles (I could have also used blueberries if I had some on hand).

These 4th of July cupcakes are designed to get you thinking rather than to provide you with any specific recipe. The key is the mini waffle cone deeply planted into the cupcake (do this right before serving to keep the cone from getting soggy), but what you use for the cake, frosting, and ice cream flavor is up to you!

Here are some other 4th of July ideas, using the mini cone, to get you thinking:

• Blueberry cupcakes, vanilla buttercream frosting, and cherry ice cream.
• Raspberry cupcakes, blueberry frosting, and vanilla ice cream.
• Lemon cupcakes, blackberry frosting (blackberries look blue), and coconut sorbet.

Feel free to share your original ideas in the comments!

Yellow Cake Recipe

For the curious, I'm including the yellow cake recipe that I used. I got the recipe from my Twitter friend Cakes4RockStarz. Despite the thousands of cupcakes I have made, I very rarely make a plain yellow cake and wanted to find a really good recipe. Several Twitter friends helped out by offering their favorites. I have not had a chance to try them all yet, but this one was light, moist, and flavorful. I won't go so far as to say it's the perfect yellow cake - it was missing something, though it's hard to put my very picky finger on what. So, I'm still on the hunt.

Makes 16 cupcakes

• 1/2 C butter
• 1 C sugar
• 4 egg yolks
• 3 t vanilla bean paste (you could also use vanilla extract or the seeds from 1/2 of a vanilla bean)
• 2 C flour
• 2 t baking powder
• 2 t baking soda
• 1/2 t salt
• 1 1/2 C water
• 1 T apple cider vinegar

1. Cream butter and sugar.
2. Mix in egg yolks and vanilla.
3. In a separate bowl, mix flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
4. In another bowl, mix water and apple cider vinegar.
5. Mix in dry and wet ingredients alternatively to the butter/sugar mixture, ending with the dry.
6. Fill cupcake liners 3/4 full.
7. Bake at 350 F for 20 minutes or until cupcakes bounce back when touched.

Root Beer Whipped Cream Frosting

I wasn't in the mood for a plain vanilla frosting. This recipe makes a root beer whipped cream frosting, but you can replace the root beer extract with any flavor you prefer.

• 1 C heavy whipping cream
• 1/3 C sugar
• 1/2 t root beer extract

1. Whip the whipping cream until it looks like whipped cream.
2. Mix in sugar and extract.

Other 4th of July Cupcake Ideas

Check out my other 4th of July cupcake ideas.