Late-night dessert to keep us all up...

I've been talking about this stuff to my family for years. When I was in Madrid in the early Seventies, we were in the habit of asking for cafe solo con hielo, essentially iced coffee.

One afternoon, we had stopped in this chic sidewalk cafe for a cooling afternoon refreshment and I stumbled on their variation on the idea of iced coffee. I got a large tumbler loosely packed with vanilla ice cream and a Moka Express coffeepot, with the fragrant steam of a fresh pot of espresso wafting out of the nozzle.

It was heavenly. A good half of the ice cream melted, of course, on contact with the hot espresso, but the resulting liquid—thick, sweet, creamy and delicious—was worth "losing" the ice cream for.

And of course, eating spoonsful of ice cream with espresso curling into the crevices was just fantastic.