Dessert which features an inverted ice cream cone served in a dish, and decorated to make a clown face.

The sugar cone is the clown's hat, which sits atop a scoop of ice cream, which serves the clown's head. Edible round objects are used to create a face on the head, and whipped cream around the ice cream forms the clown's collar. Apart from the fact that this must be served in a dish, it's not a traditional sundae, as the application of any sauce would ruin the effect-- unless you applied a strawberry or raspberry sauce stategically to create either the suggestion of hair or a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

Basic Recipe

Ingredients:
  • One scoop of ice cream, any flavor.

    It is traditional to use vanilla ice cream, in order to pay homage to the whiteface clown and the Pierrot. Other flavors with non-white colors will suggest an auguste clown, but as the likelihood of the person eating the sundae knowing the traditions of clowning is very small, this will be lost of them. Whatever subtlety is missed in the meaning of the ice cream's color, however, will be supplanted by the overwhelming taste of the flavor chosen.

    As blue face paint is anathema to the clown community, blue ice cream should only be used as a psy/ops tool, say, if you are serving a sundae to a professional clown and wish to terrorize him or put him under a curse.

  • One sugar cone

    Any flavor cone will do, but the important part here is to get as close to a right cone as you can, in order to get an imprimatur from a mathematician before serving.

  • Whipped cream or whipped cream product

    If you do not have a dispenser with a nozzle to shape the whipped cream, spoon the whipped cream into a pastry glove/icing tube to apply (Please msg me if you have had any success using a garnish injector).

  • Eyes: 2 of any of the following: gumballs, M&M's, Reese's Pieces, jellybeans, chocolate chips.
  • Nose: 1 maraschino cherry, or leftover edible item from trio of eye parts (above)
  • Mouth: 3-5 eye parts (above), or a chocolate covered prezel, broken to form a small arc.
  • (Optional): maraschino cherry for hat ornament.
  • (Optional): sprinkles/jimmies for color accent.
Tools required:
  • ice cream scoop.
    Of course, if you don't have the correct tool, you can improvise, but you may have trouble with item number two, below.
Instructions:
  1. Allow the ice cream to soften. Hardened ice cream direct from the freezer is not only difficult to scoop, but will not hold the other parts well.
  2. Using the scoop, place a sphere of ice cream in the center of a dish. The sphere will be the head of the clown. If you can't make a sphere, for pete's sake, get some food preparation gloves on your hands and mold the ice cream into a shape approximating a human head.
    Advanced: using the golden ratio, calculate the ideal off center spot to place the scoop of ice cream.
  3. Place the eyes, pressing the items gently into the ice cream until they stay. Err on the side of placing the eyes too close together, rather than too far apart.
  4. Place the nose. The relationship of the eyes to each other, and critically, to the nose, is best appreciated by a careful study of the art of cartooning. If you do not have access to a newspaper with daily comic strips in it, as a substitute, familiarize yourself with the "magic triangle" developed by Don Sahlin for Jim Henson's Muppets: the critical placement of eyes to nose to mouth. You may need to adjust due to your materials single color which means there is no defined pupil.
  5. Place the mouth. (Although here the Muppets will not be a suitable model).
  6. Place the cone on the head. It should be placed at a rakish angle, approximately 10 to 25 degrees from vertical. (If you are using a hat ornament, place that on the cone now).
  7. Add the whipped cream/whipped cream product. There are several schools of design for clown sundae creation. The placement of the whipped cream allows for the chef to express his or her own personal vision of edible clownhood. Thus, the whipped cream can be applied in one of the following ways:
    1. completely around the rim of the cone, to form the brim of the hat;
    2. around two-thirds of the head, giving the clown a Roman tonsure in the style of balloon animal pioneer Bev "Rebo" Bergeron, or Felix Adler, who held the title of the "White House Clown" until January 20, 2001;
    3. around the base of the head, forming a ruffled clown collar;
    4. in an "L" pattern from the cone rim down the face toward the mouth, forming muttonchops. This is notably a controversial design, as there are no historical clowns who wore muttonchops;
    5. in tufts on each side of the head, in homage to Duane "Uncle Soapy" Thorpe, or even Bozo the clown;
    These are the most common, but why not take inspiration from clowning's illustrious history, and create a new style based on the images of Oleg Popov, Abraham Lincoln's pal Dan Rice, or even the "Father of Clowns," Joseph Grimaldi?
  8. If using sprinkles, scatter over whipped cream.