Gluten-Free Baked Alaska

I know, I know. No one wants a rich sweet dessert recipe the day after Christmas.

Nonetheless, here it is because I’m not likely to make it again any time soon and I don’t want a perfectly delicious recipe to go to waste.

You can pin it for next Christmas! 🙂

I used the Martha Stewart recipe and simplified it so that it’s less of an intimidating dessert to make. She had hers in 6 individual portions, but I don’t have the materials or the space in the freezer for such a venture. So in my version, you’ll need two round cake pans buttered with a piece of wax paper cut to size (and buttered over it) to make it easy to remove the cake from the pan. You also need to pre-heat the oven to 350°F.

Your eggs need to be room temperature, and you’ll need three bowls – one for the egg yolks, one for the egg whites, and one for the dry ingredients.

Beat the 4 egg yolks for a few minutes until it turns lighter in colour, then slowly add 2/3 cup bland vegetable oil (such as canola or sunflower), beating it all the while.

To that, add a cup of sugar slowly, plus a teaspoon of vanilla. My mixture here is grainy because I used raw organic sugar.

Clean your beaters, and start whipping the 4 egg whites and add the remaining 1/3 cup of sugar. Beat until stiff.

First, mix the yolks mixture with the dry ingredients (3/4 cup plus 3T flour, 2/3 c cocoa, 1 1/4 t baking powder, and the same amount of baking soda, 1/2 t salt). I used Dove’s gluten-free flour mixture but if you don’t have access to that, I also like the Bob’s Red Mill brand.

To dry ingredients and yolk mixture, add 1/2 cup of warm water. You’ll see that it is too pasty without it.

When all that is mixed together, you want to stir in the whites. You need to use a spatula to turn the mixture over and over again.

You don’t want to over-beat it, but there should not be any streaks of white left. The mix should just be lighter in colour, like this:

Into the two pans it goes, and each one into the oven for about 30 minutes. I kept checking the cake after the first 20 minutes and turning it so it would cook evenly.

Put a wire rack on top of the pan and flip it over in one go so that the cake falls out of the pan without breaking. Remove the wax paper and let it cool.

These need to go into the freezer for at least an hour. I wrapped them in wax paper to protect them.

For the ice cream layers, I chose vanilla and chocolate and I needed a quarter gallon of each. I took them out of the freezer 20 minutes before I was ready to use them. Then I beat the ice cream to remove the lumps so it would spread easily.

This is only about half of what I used because I didn’t know I would need the entire container.

I placed one layer of cake on a foil-covered quiche pan. That was only to make the pan look prettier since it was pretty beat up, but a nice quiche-sized pan was good. Big enough to hold the meringue, and small enough to fit into the freezer. Mine might be about 13 cm.

On the first cake layer, I spread the vanilla ice cream.

I did the same thing with the chocolate – beat it first, and spread it on top of the second cake layer.

And I made sure that I had used most of the frozen vegetables in my freezer in advance so that I had room to store the entire thing overnight. You can serve it the same day if you make this part in the morning, but I like to be stress-free on the days I have a big dinner planned, so I made mine the day before.

See? Here is mine in the drawer of the freezer.

When I was ready to serve it – (as in, we had finished with dinner and were about to have dessert) – I pre-heated the oven as high as it would go. 500°F. I also removed the middle rack in the oven since the cake wouldn’t fit otherwise.

I then separated 9 egg whites (again –  these are better room temperature), started beating them, and slowly added 2 cups of sugar. This makes a beautifully stiff meringue. I poured this over the frozen cake and ice cream layers.

Then I put that in the very hot oven and set the timer to one minute. My oven heats very fast in the back, so I kept turning it after 1 minute on one side. The total cook time was 5 minutes or so, but you might not need as much. Do keep checking it and turning it each minute until the whole thing is browned like this.

This makes a beautifully caramelised meringue on top on a frozen cake with ice cream layers.

And – because it’s frozen – it does not fall apart, even though it’s gluten-free.

You simply cannot go wrong if you want something delicious and impressive to serve your guests.

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