Daring Bakers– Baked Alaska

I dodged the ice cream last month, so this time I thought I’d better buckle down and make it. It turned out very well with no large ice crystals despite my total lack of a churn. As usual, I’ll direct you to the challenge host’s blog for recipe details. The brown butter pound cake I was much less satisfied with– I thought it dry and a bit greasy. Of course, it tasted great once moistened with a little ice cream, but it’s not a recipe I’ll make again. I skipped the petit fours as too time consuming, halved the ice cream recipe, and quartered the meringue recipe. There’s only one of me! My baked Alaska didn’t go as well as hoped. I was decidedly unartistic in its construction (it got late as I waited for my ice cream to freeze) and the ice cream started to melt when I baked it. The taste was fine, but not much to write home about.

So was this experience a total loss? Not a bit! I looked over the components of the challenge and decided in about 0.5 seconds what I really wanted from it: an ice cream Sundae. Fancy? No. Challenging? Not really. Utterly delicious? Absolutely! It’s a great example of how the simple things in life are often the best. There it is: a slice of pound cake topped with homemade vanilla icecream and drizzled with dark chocolate mocha hot fudge sauce. Mmm……

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”.