Baked Alaska

from @comfortablydomestic

http://comfortablydomestic.com/2017/02/baked-alaska/

These retro cakes have been all over social media (Snapchat Discover stories, blogs, etc.) I screenshotted a picture of one a while ago and was just waiting until I had a good chunk of time to bake one. There aren't that many recipes out there for a Baked Alaska (at least ones that are not measured in grams), so I searched for them until I found the perfect one on Pinterest.

A Baked Alaska consists of a cake base and layers of ice cream covered in meringue and baked at a high temperature for a few minutes. In total, it took about 5 hours to make since we had to wait for parts of the cake to freeze multiple times. 

At the Store
All we needed to get was ice cream, vanilla beans, and cream of tartar. 10 minutes later, we walked out with vanilla beans and a kiwano (this weird orange spiky fruit). My friend thought they put the cream of tartar in their pocket, but when we stepped out of the car, we realized that none of us had it in our hands! 

The Base
We made the chocolate cake from the recipe, and all went well until we tried to get the cake out of the pan. It stuck to the bottom of the pan, so when we flipped it over, the whole top came off, leaving the bottom all lopsided and stuck to the pan. This didn't make any sense because we sprayed the pan before dumping the batter in. The cake wasn't cooled all the way, so maybe impatience got the best of us. We ended up scraping it out, smushing it back together, wrapping it in plastic wrap, and hoping that it would somehow freeze together in the freezer–you have to freeze the cake for an hour or so. The cake was also pretty crumbly, so I recommend using whatever your favorite cake recipe is for the base layer. 

The Ice Cream
As we were driving back to my friend's house, we realized we didn't buy any ice cream! We searched through the freezer, and luckily there was some vanilla and coffee ice cream. Instead of using the recipe's one flavor of ice cream, we chose to layer the vanilla and coffee ice creams. You put plastic wrap in a bowl and then the ice cream, so it shapes like a dome (how smart!). Then we waited another 2 hours for the ice cream to get rock hard–except on of the brands we used was this weird soft ice cream so that part never hardened all the way. After 2 hours, it was pretty rock hard. We flipped it over onto the frozen cake base and put that in the freezer for about 30 minutes–just enough time until my friend's mom came back with the cream of tartar that we forgot to buy for the meringue. 

The Meringue
Meringue is pretty easy to make, except this recipe called for vanilla sugar, so we had to scrape out the beans of our $5 vanilla bean in order to mix it with the cane sugar. I think it would have tasted fine with regular sugar. My friend does not own a stand mixer, so I used the hand mixer to whip it all up. My arm was dead by the time I had achieved stiff peaks. When we put the sugar in, the peaks began to droop, so I whipped it up quickly again. It was surprisingly easy to cover the cake in meringue with cool swirls. I just grabbed a heaping amount on the spatula and dropped it on the top, and it flowed down the edges in a cool textured pattern. 

We decided to add some food coloring to make the meringue colorful. Make sure you use the food coloring gels. We stuck a toothpick in a color and then placed it in a line up the cake. Then, we used the back of a spoon to swirl the colors around to make streaks. 

The Final Touch
Finally, you preheat the oven to a scorching 500 degrees F  to bake the meringue layer on the cake for a few minutes. Don't let it turn black! And don't worry, the ice cream actually DID NOT MELT. The meringue is like a protective shell and it hardens on the outside. After taking the photos for the "insta" we cut a slice and devoured it in a minute. The meringue shell had the perfect crunch/crisp, and the cake/ice cream combo was so delicious. I would totally make this again! It's super fun and delicious!