Baked Alaska
Ice cream baked in the oven and still cold. The meringue is insulation — full of air, and air does not conduct heat.
Cakes and slices · Hands-on: 45 min · Waiting: 5 h · Total time: 5 h 45 min · Servings: 8 · Difficulty: Challenging
The ice cream must freeze in the bowl for at least 4 hours, then another hour once covered in meringue. Only then does it go in the oven, right before serving.
Baked Alaska is a dessert that looks like a trick: ice cream goes into a hot oven for a few minutes and comes out browned outside and frozen inside.
It is not a trick, it is insulation. Whipped meringue is largely air, and air is a very poor conductor of heat — so a two-centimetre layer browns on the outside long before the heat reaches the ice cream. The sponge base does the same job from below. There are three conditions: a very hot oven (240 °C), a very short time (3 to 5 minutes) and thoroughly frozen ice cream (at least 4 hours at −18 °C, ideally overnight).
One more thing: the meringue has to cover the ice cream completely, right down to the base. Any gap is where heat gets in and the ice cream runs out.
The egg whites are only heated briefly here, so it is worth making an Italian meringue — whites whipped with hot sugar syrup. The syrup is around 118 °C and heats the whites through, so they are safe even without long baking (`vajcia-v-domacej-zmrzline`).
What you need
- 1 l ice cream in two flavours (vanilla and raspberry, for example)
- 1 ready-made sponge base, 20 cm across and about 1.5 cm thick
- 2 tbsp rum or orange juice to moisten the sponge
- 4 egg whites (about 140 g), at room temperature
- 200 g sugar
- 60 ml water
- a pinch of salt and a few drops of lemon juice
Method
- Line a bowl of about 1.2 litres with cling film, leaving an overhang. Fill it with the ice cream in layers, pressing each one down firmly so no air is trapped. Cover with the overhanging film and freeze for at least 4 hours, ideally overnight.
- Put the sponge on a board or a lined tray and moisten it with the rum or juice. It should be slightly wider than the bowl of ice cream.
- Turn the ice cream out of the bowl onto the sponge and peel off the film. Return it to the freezer at once while you make the meringue.
- Boil the sugar with the water until the syrup reaches 118 °C (on a thermometer; without one, about 4 minutes from boiling, when the bubbles thicken).
- Whisk the whites with the salt and lemon juice to soft peaks. Then, still whisking, pour the hot syrup down the side of the bowl in a thin stream. Keep whisking until the bowl is cool and the meringue is glossy and firm.
- Take out the ice cream and cover it completely with meringue, right down to the sponge — a layer at least 2 cm thick, with no gaps. Pull up peaks with a spatula or spoon; they brown beautifully.
- Return to the freezer for at least an hour (it will keep like this all day).
- Heat the oven to 240 °C. Bake for 3 to 5 minutes, just until the peaks colour. Stand by the oven and watch it.
- Serve immediately. Slice with a knife dipped in hot water.
Serving and storage
Covered in meringue it keeps in the freezer for up to two days. Once baked it does not wait — serve it straight away, and what is left cannot go back in the freezer.
Tips
- A kitchen blowtorch works instead of the oven. It is safer: you brown only the surface and the ice cream never warms up.
- The ice cream must be properly hard. Soft ice cream is the commonest reason the dessert runs out in the oven.
- Plain French meringue without syrup also works, but the whites stay almost raw — not suitable for children, pregnant people or older adults.
- Use a cold tray under the dessert. A hot one heats the base from below.
- No sponge? A layer of firmly pressed buttered biscuits insulates just as well.
Which ice cream works
Shop-bought will do, but homemade makes it a different dessert. These recipes of ours fit:
Amount: 1 litre (about 600 g) for the whole dessert
French vanilla ice cream (with egg yolks)
A French-style classic: vanilla custard made from egg yolks, milk and cream. Smooth, rich and fragrant.
Raspberry sorbet
Intensely raspberry, deep red and seedless. Works with frozen raspberries too.
Creamy strawberry ice cream
Ripe strawberries and cream — pink, fragrant and made without cooking the fruit.
Chocolate ice cream
Deep chocolate flavour from both cocoa and dark chocolate, softened with three egg yolks.
Lemon sorbet
Fresh, tangy and smooth — the basic recipe that teaches you how sugar turns frozen water into sorbet.
More desserts
Ice cream cake
Two layers of ice cream on a biscuit base with a crunchy layer between them. Made a day ahead, and the only hard part is slicing it.
Fried ice cream
A ball of ice cream in breadcrumbs, thirty seconds in hot oil. It only works if the ice cream is frozen solid and the coating has no gaps.
Related articles
Using eggs safely in homemade ice cream
Why raw yolks don’t belong in ice cream, why 71 °C is enough for safety while 82 °C is the cook’s upper limit for custard, and when to reach for pasteurised eggs.
Storing ice cream and what to do when it melts
What temperature to store ice cream at, how long homemade and shop-bought ice cream keeps, and why melted ice cream shouldn’t be refrozen.
A dessert with ice cream is not an ice cream recipe — we do not compute its mix composition or nutrition.