Daring Bakers: Baked Alaska

The August 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Elissa of 17 and Baking. For the first time, The Daring Bakers partnered with Sugar High Fridays for a co-event and Elissa was the gracious hostess of both. Using the theme of beurre noisette, or browned butter, Elissa chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make a pound cake to be used in either a Baked Alaska or in Ice Cream Petit Fours. The sources for Elissa’s challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop”.

So i was all on board for this, I mean what's not to like, homemade ice cream, cake and some meringue. Unfortunately this dish, at least for me, wasn't all it was cracked up to be.



Firstly the ice cream... tasted like ice cream. YEAY i did that right. I was however a little disappointing because of how much people brag on home made ice cream over store bought. I really couldn't taste a difference. Still it turned out perfect so its a good recipe.

My big problems were with the cake and the meringue. The cake was very dry, and would have been awful on it's own. The meringue was in my opinion, yucky to the taste. I may have made it wrong and in retrospect I certainly didn't whip it long enough, but either way it tasted like eggs.



On top of everything, The ice cream wouldn't harden all the way. It made putting it together very hard, and everything kinda just slopped around. But i persevered and we ate this sucker for my birthday. Captain liked it just fine, but for the work that was involved I will not be making this again... or if i do something similar I'm coating the sucker with marshmallows and not meringue.


Recipe here


I did however LOVE July's challenge which I finished this month also.

The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.-



The cake was spongy and tasty and very easy to make.



The whole thing turned out very pretty as well.



We had a melting incident during transport so the layers kinda combined a bit, but still i think it turned out nicely.

Recipe here.