Ice Cream Cupcakes

Readers of this website may be surprised to learn that cupcakes are not my all time favorite dessert.  That distinction goes to ice cream cake.  I luuuuv ice cream cake -- the highlight of my year is my birthday when I always get an ice cream cake from Baskin-Robbins or Ben & Jerry's.  If more independent shops sold ice cream cake, this website may very well have been icecreamcakefetish.com

For years I've been thinking about ways to combine my two dessert loves: ice cream cake and cupcakes.  To this point I'd been toying with the idea of baking cupcakes in ice cream cones and topping them with a scoop of ice cream.  This solution, while easy to eat and portable, doesn't really allow for you to get a bite of ice cream and cake simultaneously, which is the entire appeal of ice cream cake in the first place.  When a friend called me up to say that he saw a sign advertising "ice cream cupcakes" in the window of Mineo's Ice Cream and Sweet Treats, I thought I'd head over and investigate their approach to the problem.


It didn't take too much arm twisting to convince Baron to come to Mineo's with me.  We found the ice cream cupcakes hiding in plastic muffin containers inside the ice cream cases at the back of the store.  The friendly woman helping us explained that they had three flavors available: Rocky Road, Strawberry and Vanilla, and Tiramisu.  We asked for the latter two which she wrapped up for us in a separate box.


You can read detailed reviews of the cupcakes on Mineo's profile page.  While I have to give Mineo's mad props for making my ice cream cupcake dreams come true, at the end of the day the quality of the cake and ice cream was quite poor, and didn't come close to matching Baskin-Robbins and Ben & Jerry's ice cream cakes.  The cake tasted like it was made from box mix, and the ice cream tasted like your generic grocery store variety, but with freezer burn.  What I can't figure out is how they assembled the ice cream cupcakes.  They couldn't have baked the bottom of the cupcake, then added the layer of ice cream, and then poured batter on top and baked the top of the cupcake because the ice cream would have melted.  However, they also couldn't have baked a cupcake, cut it in half, added a layer of ice cream between the layers of cake, and then rewrapped it, because the wrapper fits too snugly, as if the whole thing was baked inside the wrapper.  How did they do it?!?

Ah well.  Maybe another dessert shop will take a stab at this, or maybe I'll just go ahead and experiment with my ice cream cone cupcakes.