I promise I'll stop talking about ice cream as soon as summer is over

...or at least that I'll stop talking about ice cream so much. But I'll probably talk about soup and maybe chocolate croissant bread pudding way more.

To celebrate the first day of the Tour de France, I invited cycling enthusiasts over and made bourbon ice cream. Here's the thing about bourbon ice cream: it's really, really good. I'm not a huge fan of bourbon; I don't have the palate and I'm not into pretending to be in a 70s political-intrigue movie, nor am I an Aaron Sorkin character. But as it turns out, if you add bourbon to a creamy custard and then freeze it, well then I love it.

Some of the smokiness remains, but the sweet cream somehow expands the flavor upwards and outwards. The only way I can describe it is that I experience bourbon mostly as a lead marble being dropped into a bucket, but that bourbon ice cream is more like a wide raft with a sail. Probably not helpful, but it's the best I can do.

I made little langue du chats (langues du chat?) as disks and then shaped them into tiny bowls in which to serve the ice cream. The only problem was that there was a slight storage miscommunication, and in an attempt to hide the cookies from the animals while we were out of the house, Joel refrigerated them, which made it so they never crisped properly.

I used the Eagle Rare Single Barrel Bourbon that Jerm and Liz brought to the housewarming and the bourbon ice cream recipe from Chez Panisse Desserts. Sadly, tomorrow I have to return all the cookbooks, as their owners are arriving back home.