Ice Cream Cupcakes

   

These frozen cupcakes are made from brownies and chocolate, vanilla and strawberry ice cream. Rather than using paper cupcake liners, I used jumbo silicone muffin cups to give them their shape.

Step 1. The base of the cupcakes is a brownie. Any brownie recipe should work. I used this recipe for basic brownies. Preheat the oven to 350F. Prepare the brownie batter and grease the muffin cups according to your brownie recipe. Add 2 big scoops of batter to the bottom of each muffin cup, filling about 1/3 of each cup.

Tap the bottom of the cups to smooth the tops.

Bake for 18-22 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center of one of the brownies comes out clean.

Let the brownies cool to room temperature, then put them in the freezer, covered with parchment paper, for 30 minutes.

Step 2. While the brownies are cooling and chilling, take the chocolate ice cream out of the freezer. Let it warm up enough so that you can transfer it to a bowl. Continue to let it warm as you stir it. Stir the ice cream until it is the consistency of soft-serve.

To make it easier to transfer the ice cream to the muffin cups, pour the ice cream into a piping bag (with no tip.)

Cut off the tip of the piping bag and remove the brownies from the freezer. Fill the muffin cups with ice cream, then smooth the top with the back of a spoon.

Place the muffin cups in the freezer, covered with parchment paper, until they are completely frozen.

Then remove the cupcakes by inverting them and pushing them out from the bottom. Return the cupcakes in the freezer while you prepare ice cream for the swirl.

Step 3. This swirl is piped with an Ateco #824 tip, using vanilla and strawberry ice cream. Attach the tip to the piping bag. To make a swirl using two flavors, fill one side of the bag with the first flavor, and the other side of the bag with the second. Tie off the end of the bag with a rubber band or twist tie.

Note: You may need to let the ice cream warm up some in order to get it into the piping bag. However, if the ice cream is too wet after filling and tying the bag off, place the bag, with the tip in a glass, in the freezer until it is a better consistency.

Step 4. When the piping ice cream is the right consistency, take the cupcakes out of the freezer and pipe the swirl.

Return the completed cupcakes to the freezer until it's time to eat them.