Baked Mount Shasta, Baked Bay Area

Recently I had the privilege of making baked Alaska. Twice!

Left: Mount Shasta; Right: Bay Area

The two incidences happened within a week of each other. the first when I was visiting Sophia in Mount Shasta (a beautiful place with awesome people and many pink accoutrement to photograph). The second was when I came back home to the Bay Area. Up in Shasta, it was my first time making baked Alaska, and it was nice to have all the things I could have done differently fresh in my mind when I came home.

For instance, cake-to-ice-cream ratio. The finished product in Mount Shasta was legit as all hell, but I couldn’t help but wonder what the dessert would be like if the cake base was thicker. Thus, instead of using the cake from the recipe Sophia and I used, I used a basic white cake from my mom’s beloved and extensively battered copy of the Joy of Cooking.

It may have been flat, but the one in Shasta had poppyseeds.
And yes, damn straight, that one on the right is PINK.

The cake-to-ice-cream ratio was also affected by using less ice cream than I did the first time around. In Shasta, we used a pint of strawberry ice cream and a pint of raspberry sorbet (not strawberry sorbet like the recipe called for because Mount Shasta is the kind of isolatedish mountain town where stores’ inventories are limited to a less excessive, existentialist-crisis-inducing volume). The ice cream and the sorbet came in quart-sized containers. In the Bay Area, I opted for halving the recipe, skipping the sorbet, and only using and only buying a pint of ice cream. This meant we had no leftovers. We had no leftover ice cream in Shasta, too, but that was for different reasons. It was imperative that I polish off the strawberry ice cream after watching Sophia use every fiber of her bicep to shovel the allotted measurement from the container. This is because my twin sister, whose favorite ice cream flavor is strawberry, lives in Sophia’s backyard, and if there is a way of depriving Stephanie of some late-night open-carton session of eating her feelings because her girlfriend left her, etc… Well, of course I would leap on the opportunity to make sure Stephanie didn’t get any herself. Because I have issues.

Also…that bit about every fiber of Sophia’s bicep? That was nothing I wanted to experience firsthand. I recommend letting the ice cream sit for ten minutes after you get it out of the freezer.

Raspberry sorbet is so pink!

The Cherry Garcia may not have been pink, but my messed up meringue was!

When setting out to make baked Alaska on my own, I discovered exactly how grateful I am for having Sophia there the first meringue around. If I was having doubts, I could look over my shoulder and be like, “OH MY GOSH SOPHIA WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING” and she’d help me out. Nothing went wrong with the meringue Sophia and I made, so I got all cocky, thinking I could handle this; thinking I could drive with one hand on the steering wheel and the other feeding my Tamagotchi; thinking that, once I got home to my mother’s stand mixer, I had this shit down.

Sophia’s electric mixer; pineapple not included.

If our meringue was of this consistency in Shasta, I would have remembered. Because if our meringue in Shasta had the same consistency of what I did in the Bay Area, I would have looked at Sophia and asked, “Does this meringue need therapy?”

This can’t be right.

My theory is that the eggs got over-whipped. It’s not because I was feeding my Tamagotchi. I don’t even have a Tamagotchi (anymore). I was staring at the whisk attachment spinning around in a blur, and mentally, mundanely observing that the eggs were being beaten. And that “beat” rhymes with “cheat”. Which led to a long, long trail of thoughts that had nothing to do with baked goods, or cheating for that matter.

The results weren’t catastrophic, per se. It just looked like it needed therapy.

The other thing to keep in mind if you’re setting out on a similar culinary excursion is that your baked Alaska will require freezer space.

Down here in the Bay Area, I live in a house that has three (yes, three) freezers. It’s not outside the realm of possibilities that we collectively have more freezer space than Sophia and Jeff do. However, I had a potential height issue. I didn’t take freezer-space into consideration when I halved the recipe, but in that regard, I’m totally glad I dud halve the recipe, because I think I would have run into a problem if I crafted it at full size.

I like this shot because it looks like it’s bleeding raspberry.

In summation:

• Both tasted great. The choices of ice cream made them very different: raspberry sorbet/strawberry ice cream in Mount Shasta and Cherry Garcia in the Bay Area. I liked them both, but I prefer the larger cake – it’s not as dense, and therefore more texturally compatible with the ice cream.
• When you’re a meringue beginner, it’s good to have a Sophia around.
• The meringue really is the most challenging part of the recipe. Baked Alaska is actually kind of easy. Don’t let the wow-factor of the unmelted-ice cream parlor trick lead you to believe it’s all arduous and complicated. It’s not. 

Maybe the meringue wouldn’t have lingered on the pizza pan if I did it right?

Have you made baked Alaska before? Or even just meringue, in or out of a baked Alaska context?