Short and Sweet

Clever humans! Someone in Jacksonville decided to convert this mimetic Twistee Treat ice cream building (just like the one in St. Pete's Beach!) into a cupcake shop and take advantage of the fact that an ice cream cone does kinda resemble a cupcake if you put a candle on top and sufficiently flog your suspension of disbelief.

Then again, not everyone's adept at that. As this newspaper article notes:

Though customers still walk up and ask for a large vanilla cone, there is no soft-serve ice cream inside. Just cupcakes and cookies.

More importantly, the article gives us valuable new research insight into the background of our Twistee Treat fascination:

It looks like something from the 1950s, when buildings-as-kitschy-art lined American byways. There were giant oranges, hot dogs, milk bottles and motel rooms that looked like teepees.

But the Twistee Treat cones actually only date to the early 1980s. It was a Florida company, founded in Cape Coral. There were 23 Twistee Treats in the state when the company filed for bankruptcy in the early 1990s.

A new company was formed a few years later and it’s believed that about 90 of the buildings were built over the years and about half have torn down.