Because there's no set menu in a home kitchen, every dinner is a nightly special. But all too often, home cooks find themselves in a rut, recycling the same meals week after week. Nightly Specials shows home cooks how restaurant and home cooking can meet. Acclaimed New York chef and host of the Travel Channel's Epicurious, Michael Lomonaco, along with award-winning food writer Andrew Friedman, offer up 125 recipes that use fresh and spontaneous ingredients to create innovative starters, salads, entrees, sides, and desserts. All the recipes are simple, loosely improvised dishes that will inspire home cooks to be flexible and remain open to each day's culinary possibilities. Best of all they can be selected at the last minute and cooked successfully in relatively little time.
Baked Alaska with Coconut Sorbet and Chocolate Ice Cream
Recipe from:
Nightly Specials
by Michael Lomonaco and Andrew Friedman, Photographs by Shimon and Tammar Rothstein Cookbook Heaven at
Recipelink.com
Baked Alaska has been floating around as a dessert since Thomas Jefferson’s day, albeit with different names. Fannie Farmer is said to have named this masterwork of confection - ice cream and sorbet surrounded by toasted meringue. The ice cream and sorbet bombe can be kept frozen for weeks before being covered with meringue and toasted. You can use a store-bought sponge cake and skip steps 1 through 5. You can also, of course, make this with store-bought ice cream and sorbet. In any case, you will need a 2-quart ice cream bombe mold.
First make the sponge cake: In a bowl, whip the egg yolks with 2 tablespoons of the sugar and the vanilla until creamy and yellow.
In another bowl, whip 4 of the egg whites to soft peaks, add the remaining 4 tablespoons sugar, and continue to whip the whites to stiff peaks.
Carefully fold the beaten egg whites into the yolk-sugar mixture. Using the same care, fold in the sifted flour.
Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper, pour the cake batter onto the sheet, and spread out the batter to evenly coat the sheet. Bake on the oven’s center rack until the top is golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool the cake quickly on a rack near an open window.
Begin to assemble the baked Alaska by cutting the sponge cake n 2 pieces to the shape of the bombe mold. (Cut a large piece for lining the mold and a smaller piece for the top, which later will be inverted to become the bottom.)
Line the bombe mold with plastic wrap and then place the larger piece of cake on top of the plastic.
Remove the sorbet and ice cream from the freezer and allow to soften for 10 minutes. Spoon or scoop the sorbet into the cake-lined mold) creating an even layer. Cover the sorbet with the ice cream in the same fashion1 smoothing out the ice dream into one even layer. Place the remaining layer of cake on top of the ice cream layer to act as a seal Freeze the bombe for 4 to S hours, or up to 2 weeks.
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.
To finish the Alaska, whip the remaining 4 egg whites to soft peaks add the 1/4 cup sugar, and continue to whip to stiff but not dry peaks. (This is your meringue.) Pour the meringue into a pastry bag fitted with a star tip. Unmold the bombe. Use hot towels to help loosen the bombe if necessary and invert the bombe onto a heatproof serving platter.
Remove the plastic wrap and pipe a decorative design of meringue all around the base of the bombe. Cover the entire bombe with this meringue in as decorative a design as you can manage, being as creative as you like, but working quickly to avoid melting too much of the ice cream and sorbet. Bake the Alaska for just 5 minutes, to lightly brown the meringue but not melt the ice cream.
Remove the baked Alaska from the oven, slice into individual servings, and serve immediately
VARIATION: Use different flavors of ice cream and sorbet. Purchase if you prefer not to make them.
