Helado de Queso, Mexican Wedding Cookies, Pecan Tuiles

I was reading my first Gourmet magazine (thanks Eve & Sully) on the morning shuttle, yesterday. The theme was Spanish tapas and they had a recipe for "helado de queso" (Spanish cheese ice cream) with sherry vinegar syrup which for some reason struck me as amazing and requiring immediate preparation. It took three grocery stores to find all the ingredients, but I made it that night. Pretty straightforward, as far as ice cream recipes go, but I only Ralph's had the sherry vinegar and only Whole Foods had the Spanish Mahón cheese. Other ingredients were milk, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and cream cheese. It turned out delicious. The ice cream had almost a cheese cake flavor, but not quite. The syrup, a reduction of sherry vinegar and brown sugar, was very unusual, but GOOD. I need to try vinegar in desserts more often, which works out because I have somehow aquired like seven bottles of the stuff.

Tonight, I made two more recipes from Room for Dessert: Mexican wedding cookies and pecan tuiles. Tuiles are a neat item. They're these really thin cookies that come out of the oven still soft, so you can mold them into different shapes. They harden as they cool, so then you've got this fun crispy shape that you can garnish a dessert with. With which you can garnish a dessert. This recipe was different than the one we used back in school; it included corn syrup and finely chopped pecans and spread out in the oven a lot more than I expected. Delicious, though. Both recipes.

In the pictures we've got the helado de queso with the syrup and a tuile cookie served in one of my new martini glasses and a sheet of the Mexican wedding cookies about to go in the oven.