[ViolaMum]

Originally Posted by RealLifeMama

Yum!!!! Are you making the Baked Alaska? I know you are quite the baker/cook, right?
DH gave me a kitchen torch for Christmas and I have yet to use it. Is Baked Alaska as daunting as it seems?

Yep, I made it! The fam loves torching them. We use a plumbing torch from Home Depot. You can fill a shot glass with alcohol, put it in the top of the meringue after covering the cake and torch that for a volcano effect. Sprinkling cinnamon over the top gives you sparks.

You should try it! It's really not as hard as it sounds, just time-consuming. You can spread it out - bake the cake one day, form the ice cream the next, make the meringue last. If you are at all skeeved out by the possibility of raw eggs in the meringue, you can make a Swiss Meringue (cook the egg whites and sugar over a water bath to 140 degrees, then beat in a stand mixer). Most recipes I've seen call for Italian meringue (cooking the sugar syrup and adding that to beaten egg whites.) But I screw those up as often as not. It's fun to pick different flavor combinations (this year it was chocolate-cinnamon cake, coffee ice cream, and chocolate meringue) and different shapes for the finished cake (wide shallow bowl vs tall bowl vs log, for instance).


Dinner tonight, by contrast, was a little pedestrian - pan-fried lemon pork chops, roasted cabbage wedges, and glazed carrots. I felt compelled to make a cherry crisp after dinner, but the kids were already in bed and didn't get any.