Baked Alaska

I was ever so excited to be accepted into the Daring Bakers community at the end of last month. So excited, in fact, that I turned my very first Daring Challenge into a semi-communal event :)

Alex - guest photographer for this post and fellow Ravenclaw extraordinaire

August's challenge was the option of making either Baked Alaska or petits fours using a brown butter pound cake and homemade icing. My original plan was to make both, however time constraints (working more than forty hours a week!) prevented me from finishing them, so they have been sitting lonely in my freezer for weeks now.

Action shot!

Making the ice cream was easy, especially since I happened to purchase an ice cream machine at the beginning of the summer. Browning the butter seemed daunting but turned out to be easy and smelled delicious. The cake was merely okay, probably not a make again.


My grandpa, who was a pro cook on a convoy ship in WWII, happened to come by at the very moment I was about to make the meringue. Of course I recruited him to help :)

He showed me some tricks of the trade, including chilling the eggs whites, bowl and beaters in the freezer for a few minutes. I had read before that egg whites beat better when at room temperature, but this method seemed to work really well. The meringue was delicious, but unfortunately I ruined the entire dessert by failing to cover all the ice cream, allowing it to melt in the oven!


I'm calling this one a re-do! But this is what learning is all about. Thanks for reading, and dftba!