Ice Cream Cupcake Roundup with Cupcake Project

A while back the fabulous Stef at Cupcake Project contacted us about co-hosting an Ice Cream Cupcake Roundup. What could be better than cake and ice cream all in one, we thought...not much, except, well, cake and ice cream all in one in a mini version -- a single serving just for you!

So, during the month of May, Cupcake Project and Scoopalicious will be co-hosting an Ice Cream Cupcake Roundup. If cupcakes are the "it" thing, we are hoping ice cream cupcakes will become the summer "it" thing.

We want you to send us your ice cream cupcakes. Post about them and be sure to include directions for others. Tell us what worked and what didn't work. Get creative. Try different flavors of ice cream and cake. We can't wait to see what you come up with!

Let's take ice cream cupcakes out of the sidelines and make them a top choice for a summer dessert.

To participate:

Post on your blog about ice cream cupcakes some time in the month of May and link back to this post somewhere in yours to spread the word about the event. Feel free to use the event logo if you'd like!

Send an email to stef at cupcakeproject dot com by May 30th with:

• Your name
• Your blog's name
• The name of your ice cream cupcakes
• A link to your post on ice cream cupcakes
• A photo of your ice cream cupcakes!

Stef will respond to all entries. If you don't hear back from her within a couple of days of sending the email, drop her a note to make sure she got it.

Don't blog? That's ok too! Send us a little note about your ice cream cupcake along with a photo and we'll post a little something for you on our site.

Need some tips to get you started? After the break is Stef's quick and dirty tutorial on how to make ice cream cupcakes.

How to Make Ice Cream Cupcakes

A simple ice cream cupcake is just cake on the bottom, ice cream on the top, and some frosting.

1. Use any cake recipe you like. Just fill your cupcake liners half as full as you normally would. You don't want the cake to come to the top because you want to leave lots of room for ice cream. Bake as normal, although you may need to cut baking times a bit since there is less cake.
2. When the cupcakes are done baking, let them come to room temperature and stick them in the freezer. I froze mine right in the cupcake tins to make it easy.
3. Remove the cupcakes from the freezer and use a spatula to cover the cupcake with ice cream. I worked with ice cream that was out of the freezer for just a couple of minutes. It was still hard but not so hard that I couldn't spread it.
4. Return the cupcakes to the freezer and wait for the ice cream to get hard again.
5. After the ice cream is hard again, you can further smooth the tops by dipping your spatula in hot water and running it over the top of the cupcakes.
6. Frost the cupcakes with your favorite frosting - I think a cream cheese frosting works best. You can also frost the cupcakes with ice cream. The words "Ice" and "Cream" in the photo above were frosted with ice cream. I found this to be REALLY hard. As I tried to pipe the ice cream, it would melt and as soon as it melted it wouldn't hold any shape. If anyone knows a good way to do this, please write about it!

Stef goes into more detail on her blog, so please feel free to visit.

I made mine a little bit differently....

This ice cream cupcake thing was quite an adventure. As ice cream, not cupcakes are my thing, for both my bases I went the mix route and I made a dense cake batter using the following recipes, as I thought a denser cake would hold up better in the little cups:

For vanilla:
1 (18 1/4-ounce) package yellow cake mix
1 egg
8 tablespoons butter, melted

For chocolate:
1 (18 1/4-ounce) package yellow cake mix
1 egg
1/2 cup vegetable oil

Mix the three ingredients with an electric mixer, and then make a one and a half inch ball and flatten it into the foil cupcake cup lined muffin tin. Bake them at 350° for 20 minutes. (Both of these recipes also make great cookies so if you have leftover dough, put similarly one and a half inch balls of it on a greased cookie sheet and bake along with your "cupcakes." I mean, these were so great and so easy that I had to make a dessert for a party and I whipped these up in about three minutes, cooked for twenty, and off to the party...)

(Note: For the chocolate, I would use the butter in place of the oil if I did this again, the cake bottoms were much harder when I used the oil over the butter.)

For the ice cream, I had planned to make a strawberry ice cream to go with the chocolate and a orange ice cream to go with the vanilla bases. However, for some reason my strawberry ice cream came out really dry and hard and it just wasn't worth using. I didn't even keep it. This might be the first time in history I actually trashed an ice cream right after making it...I think it was my fault, not the recipe's.

I did make an Orange Popsicle ice cream using David Lebowitz's The Whole Scoop. I am not sure if I love this ice cream flavor, but it's not bad. One problem was that it was super super soft, and never really hardened, which made it harder to assemble the cupcakes and hard to eat them too. I did alter the recipe a bit, making it non-alcoholic by using orange extract instead of the liquor, but that would surprise me if that was what affected the hardness, because usually alcohol keeps things from freezing.

So, I used a large scoop to scoop the creamsicle ice cream onto the vanilla bases...I ran out of the ice cream though (maybe it was too large a scoop?), so I experimented with a few others...some of the chocolate that I used on the chocolate cakes, and some cinnamon frozen yogurt I had made a while back...I out them back in the freezer to chill...

I then made a white chocolate shell to pour on top. I altered a version of a hardening shell used in Tartufi in Lebowitz's book as well. The problem with this was that I think that the different make up of the white chocolate made a huge difference in the outcome. My "hard shell" was soft and chewy like caramel. (And ok, ok, David, I have learned not to alter your already fabulous recipes!!!) While this would make a YUMMY candy, it made eating the hard base, the soft ice cream, and the chewy topping an almost impossible feat!

So in the end after my strawberry fiasco, I decided to go the completely easy way with the chocolate based cakes. I went out and bought Hood's Light Under the Stars ice cream and used a large scoop to make a dome of ice cream on the top. I topped it with Hershey's Chocolate Shell Topping and some sprinkles. Simple and easy! (And yummy!)

What is great about these cakes is that you can easily make them from a cake mix, store bought ice cream, and a store bought chocolate shell, or you can use ice cream you have made yourself to give it your own personal touch. And everything is completely interchangeable in the recipe...for those picky eaters you can customize ice cream and base...Also a plus!

In the end, would I make these again? I don't know. Reviews were mixed...the chocolate ones were more of a hit, but all agreed they were hard to eat. I think the cookie base was too hard (I had pulled it from another recipe in which I LOVE the base, but you put a pumpkin cheesecake on top and then everything is just gooey). Even though I liked the initial idea of having a more solid base than just regular cake, I think that using a regular cake would work much better.

I think I WILL try making Stef's sometime in the near future though!

That was my adventure. Not a total success, but fun nonetheless! I am interested to see what our lovely readers come up with too!