7 Foods We Should All Be Using As Ice Cream Cones

Frozen pizza brand DiGiorno is goofing around for National Ice Cream Day (July 17), and is briefly turning its novelty croissant pizza crust base into ice cream cones. Unfortunately, it's not available to the masses; you'll have to sign up for a sweepstakes entry at keeplifedelicious.com. If you're one of the lucky few, you'll win a kit with two croissant cones along with two unique flavors of ice cream: strawberry tomato basil and parmesan cheese.

Why hasn't anyone done that before? More importantly, why isn't a croissant ice cream cone a standard feature at any scoop shop? It makes total sense. Just picture yourself eating ice cream out of a flaky, buttery cone that yields to each bite, gradually absorbing the ice cream as it melts. Indulgent for sure, and generally awesome. Why stop at one limited-time-only giveaway? Which other foods can we ice-cream-cone-ify in the test kitchen of the mind? Here are 7 requests we have for the snack manufacturers of America.

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.