Baked Alaska recipe

Do you want a Baked Alaska recipe for someone special in your life?  It’s surprisingly easy and our preparation of this Baked Alaska recipe – a client’s favourite pudding – for their birthday is an example of the outstanding person centred care that our caregivers provide every day.

Serves 4.  Start preparation the night before if possible.

Ingredients: 400ml of ice cream (whatever flavour you want), a Victoria Sponge, 4 large eggs, 200ml caster sugar.

We took a Good Housekeeping baked alaska recipe as inspiration and simplified it a bit.  So here’s what we did:

Empty and rinse out a standard  500ml round ice cream tub ice cream like you get when you buy ice cream from the shop.  Most come in 480ml or 500ml round tubs.  This is the sort of thing we used.  Eat any ice cream you remove or keep for later in this Baked Alaska recipe.

Line the tub with cling film (thanks to Amanda for this great tip).

Refill the lined tub with ice cream until it is about two thirds full.  Use as many flavours as you like.

Cut a pre-prepared sponge to fit on top of the ice cream.  You can use the lid as a template.  We bought a Tesco’s Finest Victoria Sponge and used one of its two halves, trimmed to size.  You can scrape of the jam if you want but, if you like jam, it adds a nice additional taste when you eat it.

Put the lid on the tub or cover with some cling film.

Put the tub in the freezer for at least an hour, if not overnight.

When you’re getting close to that magic moment of serving, put the oven on maximum:  most ovens get up to somewhere between 220 and 240 celsius.

Take 4 egg whites.  Whisk until stiff.  Then fold in 200g of caster sugar with a large spoon.  Then whisk again (like we did last summer) until it’s thick and glossy.  Sorry to state the obvious but you should time this so that when the meringue is ready the oven has reached its maximum temperature.

Remove your tub from the freezer, turn it out on an oven proof dish, tray or sheet.  Peel off the cling film to reveal your mound of ice cream supported by sponge.

Cover the spongy, creamy mound with meringue.  You can use whatever you like to do this.  We just used a knife but if you’re artistic and cheffy, by all means use a piping bag.

Make sure the whole of your mound is covered in meringue.  Depending on how much you like meringue, you can make it as thick as you like.

Put the whole thing in the oven.  If you have a glass door on your over, keep an eye on it.  We baked for 8 minutes and ended up with slightly charred tips on the meringue so probably worth setting  timer for 4 minutes and then monitoring it closely.