Mexican Dessert Recipes

Mexican dessert recipes have recently come closer to the center stage in the dessert scene. Yes, there's a dessert scene. Desserts with a Latin flair have long been on the back-burner, so to speak, but in the past few years, with the Mexican immigrant population in the United States on the rise, Mexican dessert recipes have been gaining in popularity. A few Mexican dessert recipes can spice up anyone's cook book and bring a bit of flair to anyone's party or event.

Sweet Mexican Peanuts
This is a sweet and crunchy snack that goes great as a topper on ice cream, with pretzels as a snack mix, or just as a stand-alone treat.

What You Need:
1 1/2 cups of brown sugar
3/4 cups of water
1 tablespoon vanilla flavoring
4 1/2 cups of raw peanuts with the skins (not to be confused with the shells; Spanish if possible)
a pinch of salt
butter (optional)

Procedure:
-In a pan, combine all ingredients together. Pretty easy, right?
-Fry on medium heat for about 20 minutes, or til most of the liquid has evaporated off.
-Bake the peanuts at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20 more minutes, or until you can see the sugar starting to crystalize on the surface of the peanuts.
-Remove from the oven and store in a cool environment; they stay fresh for about a week.

You may wish to spritz a little bit of cayenne pepper on them or jalapeno seeds for an extra spicy sort of touch.

Mexican Dessert Nachos
This is a really interesting recipe in that it can go in a lot of different directions. Because you can put essentially anything crumbleable on nachos, this recipe has a lot of versatility... You can just use this as a template for any future modifications of this recipe, because anything sweet and/or salty works great with this. As a side note, don't even think about the caloric density of this treat. And now, don't even think about zebras. Don't even think about caribbou.

What You Need:
A couple handfuls of corn or flour tortilla chips (alternatively, something like Fritos or Doritos would work, too)
1/3 cup of peanut butter
1/3 cup of chocolate chips (baking chocolate; that's semi-sweet.)
1/3 cup of mini-marshmallows
3 tablespoons of powdered sugar

Procedure:
-Preheat the broiler on your oven. It may take a bit, so in the mean time, you can do some prep work.
-Combine the peanut butter and confectioner's sugar. Nuke this concoction in the microwave or on the stove at a high temperature until it's become runny. Think hot queso, here. It should take a minute or two.
-Get a pan ready and arrange your tortilla chips however you like on it.
-Drizzle the peanut butter and confectioner's sugar mixture over the tortilla chips.
-Sprinkle on your chocolate chips and anything else, and your marshmallows.
-Place the pan in the oven and have it broil until the marshmallows start to sort of toast up. The chocolate chips should get really nice and gooey here. Golden brown marshmallows.
-Eat, and enjoy.

A few mutations of this recipe include:
-Adding the chocolate chips to the peanut butter and confectioner's sugar before you mix them together so that you get sort of a peanut-butter-chocolate drizzle.
-Leaving out the chocolate chips and peanut butter and instead using more marshmallows, butter, and cinnamon. A twist on cinnamon toast.
-Baking the nachos instead of broiling them; this ends up having a slightly different effect on the texture of the nachos, which can be interesting.
-Lemon juice and coconut shavings at the omission of everything else can be a unique tropical sort of twist on this.