Baked Alaska

I have beaten egg whites, crematarte, and sugar together to give us a nice stiff meringue

And you know, baked Alaska is an old reliable standby. But I think one of the reasons I love it so is because I can make it and kind of do my own thing

And actually, I had some red velvet cake left over from dinner last night

so that's what I'm going to use in mine tonight. And it's nothing but a nice, moist cake that's got red food coloring in it

and just a little bit of cocoa to give it a little bit of a hint of chocolate

but only it's red. And I'm just going to kind of square these up so they'll fit my plates

When I opened my first storefront restaurant, let's see, that was about 11 years ago

and I was still about the only person that I could find that would work for free

So I was doing all my cooking by myself. I had one waitress and me in the kitchen

and I would have couples that would come in and they'd say, oh, the night's our anniversary or it's her birthday

It's my wife's birthday. Can you do something special for me? So I always recommended that they let me prepare them a baked Alaska

because I knew I could go through my kitchen and find something that would blow them away

So we're going to start by putting a slice of cake down on our plate

and now I'm going to add the ice cream to it. And I thought that strawberry ice cream would be beautiful

with a red velvet cake, So that's what I'm using tonight. You know, when people hear the words baked Alaska

it kind of frightens them because they think, oh gosh, that sounds way too fancy or way too complicated

And it's not at all. It's so simple. Now I've got my red velvet cake

I'm going to put my strawberry ice cream down on that, and I'm going to kind of press it in

and I'm going to top it with another piece of cake and kind of press that down into the ice cream And then all we going to do is just frost it with our meringue and run it in a hot oven until those peaks are just a light wonderful brown See how

simple that is? In fact, the first time I ever read a recipe for Baked Alaska, I was

a little intimidated and put off, and I thought after reading it, you know, this does not have

to scare me or intimidate me. I think I can do it my way and make it very, very user friendly

And like I said, it was one that I could make very quickly in the restaurant. I could run

over and beat up my meringue real quick like and find some cake and find some ice cream

and I was home free, which is about the story of my life. The main thing that you want to

worry about when you're putting your Alaska together is you want to make sure that you

bring that meringue all the way down and seal it on that plate because you want to keep that

real hot heat from getting into your ice cream and melting it. And I'm going to take my knife

and just get me some little peaks going so when that goes in the oven those little tips

will be nice and brown. If you're having a dinner party and having a few couples over

it's a lot of fun to make this into one big cake and just put it on the table and pass

out the spoons and everybody just dig in together. And look-a-there, we have a dessert

that looks like we have just worked ourselves silly on, and you can see I did it in a matter

of five to six minutes. We're going to run these in the oven until the peaks are nice

and brown, but one of the fun things you must do with this dish is to watch it as it goes

brown in the oven. A few seconds either way can make all the difference, and there's no

set time. I think this one might be ready. And here's how you're going to know. You should be

able to scoop into this mountain of creaminess and have it hot on the outside and icy cold on the inside