Baked Alaska is the holy trinity of desserts. It contains cake, ice cream, and meringue. Please excuse me as I wipe the drool trickling out of my mouth. I realize this dessert sounds ambitious as hell, but in reality, all you do is bake a cake, plop ice cream on top, and cover the whole thing with meringue. It is perfect for any special occasion and is sure to impress.
A bonus is that the cake is tie-dyed and uses better-for-you ingredients. I use mostly white whole wheat flour, but you can use 4 cups of all-purpose flour rather than the 1 cup all-purpose/3 cups whole wheat combo. This will make the cake fluffier and the tie-dye colors brighter. But it will take away the benefits of the whole grains.
Since the cake uses oil instead of butter, you can make this Baked Alaska 100% dairy-free by using coconut milk or almond milk ice cream. In other words, you can eat this for breakfast. You’re welcome.
Baked Alaska
Ingredients
Instructions
Put the entire gallon of softened ice cream into a bowl. The bowl should be the same diameter as the 10-inch circular springform pan you’ll be baking the cake in. Then, cover the bowl with saran wrap and put back in the freezer. Let freeze for 6 hours.
Preheat your oven to 350°F. My oven says 325°F because it’s convection.
Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl and set aside.
In a separate bowl add the milk, oil, 1 cup sugar, mashed banana, extracts, and eggs, then whisk them together.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and beat together until combined.
Pour about 1 1/2 cups of batter into three separate bowls. Make sure there is still some batter left in the bowl. Then add food coloring to each of the three bowls and mix together.
Add the plain colored batter to a greased 10-inch springform pan.
Now add a dollop of each color into the pan, take a toothpick, and drag the toothpick through the batter to swirl the colors. Repeat this process until all the batter is gone.
Bake the cake in the preheated oven for 1 hour and 5 to 10 minutes. A toothpick should come out clean when inserted into the middle.
After it’s finished baking, place it on a cooling rack and let cool for at least half an hour. You can take the cake out of the pan once it is cool enough.
To make the meringue, simply put the egg whites and cream of tartar into a large metal bowl and use an electric beater to whip them. Whip until you achieve soft peaks like in the photo below.
Now add the sugar and whip for around 5 minutes until you reach stiff peaks (like in the photo below) and the meringue looks glossy.
Level your cake if the top of it is uneven. Then, take the bowl of ice cream out of the freezer and carefully spoon out the ice cream from the bowl onto the top of the cake, with the flat part of the ice cream touching the cake. Then quickly coat the entire cake/ice cream in meringue.
Lastly, take a lighter (or blowtorch) and hold it over the meringue so it browns. And voila! The hard work is finished and now you can devour the Baked Alaska. Or, you can get super fancy and pour some liquor over the cake, light it on fire, and flambé it. Either way, it tastes (and looks) amazing.