A few tasty reasons why sugar cones aren’t just for summer…

Sticky Sugar Cone and Caramel Bars

So my husband bought a case (yes, a 200-count case) of sugar cones earlier this year. Most of them were used at Wild About Game where he served up scoops of his ridiculously delicious foie gras ice cream. But he ran out of ice cream before he ran out of cones and so for the past few months I have been shuffling the box around our kitchen.

Finally I figured if he wasn’t going to do something with the leftovers, I would. My first creation was a chocolate toffee bark. I didn’t have the silvered almonds that the recipe asked for so I used crushed sugar cones instead. I added a bit of sea salt as well and called the whole thing a success.

Toffee & dark chocolate bark with sugar cones

After that I did some digging online and found a recipe that actually called for sugar cones, these caramel-date and ice cream cone bar cookies. And since I found them on a post titled “The 12 Cookies of Christmas” I could even claim they were seasonally appropriate! (This year Christmas approached so quickly my holiday baking suffered some serious set backs.)

The cookie part of the bar is similar to a blondie — lots of sugar, butter, vanilla, flour — but it also includes an ample amount of chopped pecans and crushed sugar cones.

Cookie base heading in to the oven…

After it’s baked, the base is topped with a slightly creamy caramel-date sauce and then garnished with more crushed sugar cones and pecans.

My precious!

While I was excited by how easy the recipe was to follow, I was absolutely ecstatic at the result. The bars are sticky, buttery and crunchy all at once — a beautiful melding of flavors and textures that made them surprisingly addictive. I was worried about them being overly sweet but the fruity dates somehow saved the caramel sauce from being cloying. I wasn’t sure how they would go over with my co-workers, but everyone loved them.

So while Christmas may be over and summer may still be far away, that doesn’t mean that you should resist making these. Oh — and all in all, this recipe helped me use up eight sugar cones — only about 40 left to go!

Sugar Cone and Caramel Bars