Wanna Green Bean: National Baked Alaska Day

2 February 2009

National Baked Alaska Day

February 2, is National Baked Alaska Day. For the rest of this year, 2009, I will be featuring random foods of the day! There are so many different national food days in America, there is no way I’m going to be able to capture them all, but if there’s one you want me to feature, let me know !

I know I’m already a day late for February 2nd’s national food day, please forgive me. I made some Baked Alaska, then completely forgot its hard to post something while you’re reformatting your computer.

For those of you who don’t know, Baked Alaska is a dessert consisting of cake, topped with ice cream, then covered with meringue, and the entire thing baked in a really hot oven, or the meringue browned under a broiler or blow torch.

I’ve done a little research on where this crazy dish came from, and historical accounts are from all over the place. The basic idea of baking ice cream originates from a variety of places like China and France, with some attributing it to Delmonico’s Restaurant in commemoration of the purchase of Alaska from Russia.

Wherever it came from, its hard to believe that the ice cream doesn’t melt!

To test this theory of non-melting ice cream I had to try it myself. The idea itself is simple, but I didn’t want to bake a cake. Instead I just used a brownie, which is cake-like right? And I made it individual personal pan size.

First you top your cake-like substance with hard cold ice cream (soft serve will not work here!), I used cookies and cream ice cream.

Then stick it back in the freezer to get it really cold.

While its freezing whip up a few egg whites (I used 2) with some cream of tartar (just a pinch) and some vanilla extract, until you have soft peaks.

(You may want to get your broiler roaring, or find your blow torch at this point.)

Slowly add a little under 1/4 of a cup of sugar, one table spoon at a time, beating until you have stiff peaks. (Eh, this is stiff enough!)

Put all that eggy goo in a piping bag (or you can just spoon it on if you don’t have one) and pipe the meringue decoratively around the frozen ice cream and cake-like substance.

Stick that bad boy under the heat and watch carefully so it doesn’t burn (or almost burn like mine did).

So to test this theory of non-meilting ice cream surviving some hot hot heat, I had to try it.

It worked! The ice cream is no more melted then it would be if it was just sitting in a bowl waiting for me to eat it. The meringue was tasty sweet and fluffy and cooked like the meringue on the top of a pie would be (I’d hope so, because I stole the meringe recipe from a lemon meringue pie!).

The only thing I would do differently is not use a brownie. Brownies become very very hard when exposed to freezing temperatures. Also if I ever made a small Baked Alaska like this one again, I’d probably only use one egg for the meringue, two was much more than enough!