You thought I was NEVER going to make anything, didn’t you? You were thinking “Tara is all talk, she just wants people to look at pictures of her, she isn’t really that attractive, I bet she can’t cook or sew or anything, I’d rather read her ex-husband’s blog….”
But look, Dear Reader, at THIS:
THAT, friend, is a baked alaska. I made a traditional French genoise (and please, pardon my lack of accent aigu) cake, soaked it in amaretto, covered it in coffee and chocolate ice cream, frosted it with meringue, doused it in whiskey and LIT IT ON FIRE!
From there, the whiskey dribbled off my insufficient plate and lit the host’s counter on fire. But it was DELICIOUS! View my contentment:
I’m actually eating a piece of baked brie here, but you get the idea.
How did she do it? Let me tell you: I baked the cake in my springform pan. This is the only pan I have for baking cakes. A nice dry cake like the genoise is, I think, the best bet. The ice cream doesn’t melt as much as you would think, but a fluffy cake would just taste like the old birthday cake and ice cream combo that you enjoyed in grade school and this is a sophisticated dessert. To mold the ice cream I found a bowl in my pantry with the same circumference as the cake pan, then guesstimated how much icecream I would need to fill the bowl (it was about 1 and a quarter of the typical 1.75 quart box). I let the ice cream soften, then I scooped it into the bowl and let it harden again. Getting it out of the bowl was tricky, but ultimately you cover the thing with meringue, so it doesn’t have to be smooth. Separating the eggs and making the meringue was the only part that really required any cooking skill. I suppose some people can’t bake cakes. You could make it with brownies, but come on.
How I lit it on fire: save half an egg shell from the meringue (and wash it, obviously) and wiggle it into the merigue so it’s mostly not visible– I’m not sure that this really worked since the egg just seemed bigger than it should have been and made a large funnel of fire that only moderately trickled over the rest of the cake. In the future, I might just try making an indent in the meringue and pouring the liquor into that. But anyways, you get the liquor up to bubbling and as soon as it’s there pour it into the egg. We poured straight from the saucepan and the liquor in the saucepan subsequently lit on fire. I’m skeptical that using a ladle would eliminate this problem, but it would probably look more professional. Our hosts only had plastic ladles and no one wants to take any chances heating plastic these days.
And when we cut into it, this is the beauty that was inside:
(That’s the hostess, Molly.)
Allow me to curtsey and applaud the pianist like a proper ballerina.
Yum.
Wow, congrats & well done. Looks better than most things I bake. Reminds me of a barbie I was cooking on New Years Eve, everything was cooked well as the meat lit on fire multiple times.
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