7 Foods We Should All Be Using as Ice Cream Cones

The logic of this one should be self-evident. People love dipping their french fries into their Frostys at Wendy’s. So just imagine a shatteringly crisp cone made entirely out of Pringles: salty, crisp, and full of potato flavor. I could see that playing as a nice contrast to ice cream, big time. We’d just have to figure out a way to keep the entire thing from shattering after the first bite—but that’s for the R&D department to figure out.

People are fans of waffle cones, aren’t they? (Those cones aren’t really waffles, strictly speaking, but why get technical about it?) So, I propose a rolled-up pancake cradled in a cardboard holder, hugging some big fat scoops of ice cream. As the ice cream melts a little, it’ll soak right into that pancake. Or how about a flight of silver dollar ice cream cones, each with a different sample-size scoop? On that note, how about crepes? This entire category is rife for further exploration.

Fried cannoli shells are a great foil to their inner filling, which is typically a sweetened fluffy ricotta cheese mixture. Stuff a few scoops of ice cream in there, top with pistachios, dab on a few miniature chocolate chips, and boom, you’ve got a winner. I’m not usually a person who daydreams about dessert, but here we are.

Mention the word “churro” in my presence and I can instantly smell that cinnamon-sugar-dusted fried dough that sends all my senses alight. Since churros’ tubular form is already often paired with a central filling, it doesn’t seem like a tall order to slightly convert its chewy, tearable goodness into a conical shape. Find a way to widen the mouth of a churro for this purpose and I’d magically appear in front of you with a pair of ice cream scoops (it’s a talent I have). Even though this isn’t a thing just yet, I feel it deep within my bones. And my nostrils.

Fortune cookies would make a pretty great candidate for an alternate cone, considering their crisp yet sturdy texture. In fact, they aren’t terribly different from waffle cones, if you think about it: big crunch with a mild sweetness. If you rolled a giant fortune cookie up into a cone and sealed it up tight enough so that melted ice cream couldn’t leak out, I think you’d be onto something. Just ditch the fortune altogether.

Hotteok is a kind of Korean pancake that’s often sold as a street food in Korea. I realize I mentioned pancakes already, but these have one very important distinction. You see, hotteok is filled with a sweet mixture of ingredients such as brown sugar, cinnamon, peanuts, and more. If you think pancakes are good, wait until you try one of these things. I guarantee you that a puffy, griddled ice cream cone stuffed with a syrupy hot brown sugar filling would become the next cronut. (Or at least the next taiyaki.)

There’s a reason people order their pie a la mode. Buttery, crumbly, slightly savory pie crust pairs perfectly with the creamy sweetness of a scoop. Logistically, it would have to be pretty thick to avoid disintegrating as you worked your way through the ice cream, but I don’t think anyone would complain about that—the crust is everyone’s favorite part of the pie. Maybe someday science will have advanced enough to create an ice cream cone out of a classic Hostess pudding pie. Until then, I can dream.