Leave Store-Bought Ice Cream Cones On The Shelf And Grab This Gem Instead

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Ice cream cones are as essential as eggs in some households. But before you stock up, consider this epic alternative that substitutes freshly baked cinnamon roll cones for the crisp, store-bought kind you're used to. In a video posted by the Facebook account Home Hacks & Easy Snacks, a person wraps unraveled cinnamon roll dough around cones of aluminum foil. Each layer touches the one before it, creating a solid cone without gaps. The dough cones are rolled in cinnamon sugar and baked for 23 to 27 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Once they've cooled, the person in the video removes the foil mold, revealing a cinnamon roll cone that can hold ice cream.

It's sort of a reverse of the popular ice cream-cinnamon roll hack that calls for topping raw dough with ice cream before baking to infuse the rolls with extra fat, sugar, and moisture. (Some might prefer five-ingredient TikTok cinnamon rolls, which are doused in heavy cream and cinnamon butter for similar results.) However you serve them, these ingredients are a match made in dessert heaven.

All you need for this store-bought ice cream cone substitute is a tube of cinnamon rolls. The video features Pillsbury Grands Cinnamon Rolls with Cinnabon Cream Cheese Icing, but the choice is yours. If you have extra time, you can use homemade dough instead, perhaps with our easy cinnamon roll recipe.

The cinnamon rolls ice cream cones inspired various reactions on Facebook. One commenter compared them to chimney cakes, or kürtöskalács, a Hungarian pastry that's traditionally made by wrapping dough around a wooden spool. A critic argued that the ice cream would leak through the bottom of the cones, but that's nothing a cooling rack and patience (or alternatively, speedy eating) can't fix. Another user suggested turning them upside down and decorating them with icing to give them the appearance of snow-covered trees.

You could also try a savory take on the hack. For instance, use pizza dough to make cones. You could fill these with your favorite sauces, cheeses, and toppings à la Kono Pizza, which went viral in the 2010s for its pizza Kones. Or, you can turn the dough into garlic bread cones with butter and fresh garlic and then pack them with pasta, cheese, or meat. If you want an alternative that keeps things strictly sweet, swap cinnamon roll dough for pie crust or puff pastry, and fill the cones with fruit fillings, fresh produce, whipped cream, ice cream, or nuts.

There are plenty of other ways to upgrade canned cinnamon rolls, though. (And there's no reason you couldn't pair those creative takes with ice cream.) One popular hack from imtheofficialdarlene showed her Instagram followers how to turn cinnamon rolls into doughnuts by punching holes into their centers with a bottle cap and frying them instead of baking. You could also smash and roll the dough into a single sheet, then use it as the base of a pie or galette.