Blue Bell makes an amazing Ice Cream Cone, but this post isn’t about their delicious vanilla ice cream with dark chocolate-coated cone pieces. This post is about the actual ice cream cone, you know, the crispy crunch pastry thing that holds ice cream in it, and on top, so you can eat it without a spoon.
If ice cream on a cone is so popular today, that’s because somebody, somewhere, some time ago came up with the brilliant idea of inventing it.
The invention of the ice cream cone
Many recipes are an accidental result, and many things in the world have been created accidentally, but not the ice cream cone. This cone-shaped pastry was invented by an Italian in New York, and it was a well-thought idea.
Italo Marchiony immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and gave the world the first ice cream cone in 1896. His invention was patented in 1903.
Another ice cream cone was created independently a year later at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Ernest Hamwi, who was operating on the premises a commercial booth and sold a type of pastry called zalabis, came up with this clever idea of rolling dough in the shape of a cone to hold ice cream when the vendor next to him ran out of dishes.
The ice cream cone industry took off immediately with the town of St. Louis capitalizing on the creation and entrepreneurs inventing baking equipment that baked in larger amounts. The industry has been producing cones worth hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and it is estimated that about 150,000 cones are made every day.
Four types of ice cream cones
Ice cream cones come in four different versions.
- One is the cake cone, also known as the wafer cone because of its texture similar to a waffle.
- Another is the pretzel cone that ads salt to the recipe to enrich sweetness and flavor of the ice cream.
- The third is the sugar cone, sweeter than the cake cone.
- And the fourth is the waffle cone, which combines different flours and adds more sugar to the batter for more crispiness.
Each of the cones provide different serving sizes and usually hold 1 to 2 scoops of ice cream, although bigger cones are also made to hold more scoops. And each of them comes with 2 types of bottom, either pointed or flat.
Although you can find ice cream cones of all types at grocery stores, it’s easy to make them at home too. It takes a few ingredients and a skillet pan to make store-bought-like cones. Here is a simple recipe to follow:
- Whisk 2 eggs with ½ cup sugar in a large bowl until they form small bubbles.
- Add ¼ cup melted and cooled butter to the eggs, 3 tbsp milk, ½ tsp vanilla extract, then gradually a 1/3 cup all-purpose flour and 1/8 tsp salt. The mixture should be smooth and thin. If needed, you can add more milk.
Note that the skillet pan should be well heated to cook the mixture, and the cone needs to be formed while still hot, squeezing the end to seal. It has to cool completely before filling with ice cream.