A bit more about my birthday baked Alaska. 1 September 2009 8:52 am
Posted by Tracy in : baking,books,cooking,dessert,events,friends,hot mess,pictures,seasonality , trackbackI kept adding details to the “spectacular birthday dessert” portion of yesterday’s post until I realized there was no way I could cut my remarks down to a paragraph. So the saga continues today.
Peter really wanted me to have a birthday cake this weekend, and I wasn’t very helpful about expressing an opinion on the matter. I’m not the biggest cake fan in general, and well, my birthday’s at the end of August. Growing up in New Jersey, where the end of the summer is a time of high humidity and low appetite, cake wasn’t really appropriate. I had a lot of ice cream cakes — and before you start imagining Carvel mediocrity, I’ll have you know that we got our cakes from a place in town that made their own ice cream from scratch, and it was delicious. One year my birthday cake was half a watermelon with candles in it. Summer in New Jersey, man. It’s not for wimps. Anyway.
This weekend’s weather was actually pretty cool, and Peter was not having any of this ice cream cake business, so we rummaged around in Baking Illustrated until we came up with an awesome compromise: baked Alaska. It’s got cake, it’s got ice cream, it’s got some major adventure cooking… what’s not to love? Check it out:
I only got one cross-section picture because the rapidly-melting middle meant there was even more time pressure to serve and eat the deliciousness.
Baking Illustrated‘s recipe is only one and a half pages long, not counting slightly more than a page of explication before the actual ingredients-and-instructions. But there’s a catch. The first ingredient is:
1 recipe Genoise for Raspberry Jelly roll (page 369)
Surprise! Factor in that recipe and all the descriptive text, and you end up with more like four pages of instructions, descriptions, ingredients, and so on, which is much more reflective of the insane amount of work that went into this project. In particular, Genoise cake was more complicated than initially expected — whee!
Other notes: the cake was partly soaked in a simple syrup flavored with Kahlua, which was delicious. Merengue is still not my favorite thing. It’s just a bit too much like eating the bastard love child of cotton candy and styrofoam, and non-fatness be damned: the older I get, the more I like my desserts rich rather than sweet. I really like saying that I’m too old for stuff, and I’m definitely too old to believe in nonfat anything.
Finally, and speaking of richness over sweets: We considered making our own ice cream for the cake filling, but ultimately went the easier route of buying a quart of Haägen-Dazs (dulce de leche caramel, mmmm) and I stand by that decision, and the hours of our lives it saved. If we ever make baked Alaska again, we might go whole hog and concoct our own frozen goodness in the middle, but if we do that, we’re also starting a day ahead of time instead of busting the whole hot mess out in one day.
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chanusa
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cj
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Betty
