"cone" news and stories

Some types of kids will eat the icing off the birthday cake and leave the moist, denuded slab of cake lying dead on the plate. They'll pull the crispy bits off the fried chicken and leave the meaty carcass behind.

I was the other kind of kid, the one who ate her treats slowly, methodically, from the worst to the best. I could spend half an hour on a Twix bar, nibbling off the greasy, slightly grainy chocolate from the top and sides before separating the cookie from the thick, soft strip of caramel, which I'd roll into a ball and eat last. Give me Lucky Charms and I'd eat every last bit of soggy, Styrofoam puff cereal until I had an entire bowl full of marshmallows. I'd marvel gleefully at my bounty before digging in with a soup spoon, the marshmallows slippery as minnows in my mouth.

This culinary deconstructionism and best-for-last attitude explains my affection for the Drumstick. First comes the nuts, to be picked off one by one with your front teeth. Then the shattery chocolate shell, to be broken and removed piece-by-piece. Next, the globe of sweet, bland vanilla ice cream, to be licked to nothingness in a precise spiral pattern. The chocolate-lined cone would be eaten in a spiral pattern too, with overlapping rows of tiny, neat bites.

And there, hidden at the very bottom, was a solid cone of chocolate. I'd still be savoring the melting lump in my mouth even after I'd washed the stickiness off my hands and settled in to watch the Smurfs.

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Some time, maybe last year, maybe it was the year before that, we mentioned a curious way to make and eat pizza -- in a cone. We saw it first in Seoul, South Korea, and then saw that Crispy Cones was opening franchise location in the US.

Since pizza and pasta are never far from each other, it certainly makes sense that we'd see pasta in a cone!

Okay, it doesn't make sense at all, even if the pitch is that the cones makes eating pasta more convenient and portable. Pizza makes sense because the pizza cone is essentially a more formalized version of the way many people eat large slices of thin crust pizza -- folded up. Why on Earth would one put pasta in a waffle cone?!?! Even if it is technically portable, we can't imagine that all of the ingredients, particularly long strands of spaghetti come tumbling out of the cone once you take a bite.

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Sarah let us know that pizza cones are getting to be quite the rage in Korea, but the concept of non-ice cream food in cones is clearly spreading to other parts of the world. CrispyCone touts its offerings as not only delicious and spill-proof, but also environmentally friendly and healthy, since there are no wrappers to throw away and the dough is filled with fresh veggies and lean meats (except for the cheese-filled quesadilla cone). With a location in Southern California, blogger El Chavo! went out to do a taste test for himself.

Arriving at the store, he noted that there were many filling options to choose from. He selected a Huevos Rancheros cone because CrispyCone proudly touts their breakfast offerings. The fillings are placed inside the cone, uncooked, then the whole thing is cooked in a microwave. Disposable utensils are used for cooking and it was served "in a nice cozy cardboard box holder, inside a paper bag, with a heat protecting band across the cone." So much for environmentally friendly non-packaging. Getting past the presentation, the cone turned out to be pretty inedible. The cone was a bland cracker, the fillings were funky and after three bites, our brave taster had had enough. The verdict was that it was not only "gross", but actually "reprehensible."

CrispyCones will be available in stores, in unfilled and filled-and-frozen versions, sometime next year. They might be better than the in-store versions, but don't count on it.

[via la.foodblogging]

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While the smell of waffle cones from Ben & Jerry's is alluring, I'm not sure how long that appeal would last once you invite it into your home. For $15, you can find out. The Ben & Jerry's online store also sells sprays that mimic their Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and Chocolate Fudge Brownie flavors. I'm not sure if this stuff is edible, but part of me worries that people will start using them like other food sprays. I suppose they could also be used as perfume. I know that the friends of mine that worked at Ben & Jerry's always smelled like waffle cones when they got off work. It wasn't terrible, but I think they got sick of it pretty quickly.

[Via Boing Boing]

Ice cream cones are an American invention - at least, they were invented in America. The original source of the concept is up for debate. Generally the story goes that a waffle vendor was next to an ice cream vendor at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. When the ice cream vendor ran out of cups, the waffle vendor - a Syrian named Ernest A. Hamwi, who sold a crispy pastry actually known as zalabis - rolled his product into a cone to hold the ice cream.

This is not the first time an ice cream cone was seen in the US, though. The idea was patented in New York in 1903, a full year earlier by an Italian man named Italo Marchiony, who is said to have been making the cones since 1896. The ideas were independently conceived, but it is interesting to note that the time was clearly the right one for the ice cream cone.

St Louis, as a town, is the reason for the success of the cones. Bakeries with special equipment started to produce the then-named cornucopia cones. As factories looked for easier ways than hand-rolling to produce the cones, batter-based cones, which were poured into molds and are now often known as sugar cones, were developed. Sales of cones of all kinds took off and the rest, as they say, is history.