Baked Alaska

Baked Alaska is a stunt that began as a joke. Actually, it could well have been one of the many jokes made at the expense of President Andrew Johnson’s secretary of state, William H. Seward, after he bought Alaska from Russia for just over $7 million in 1867. Wags called the distant northern territory Seward’s Folly and Seward’s Icebox, so it was probably inevitable that someone would create a snowy dessert—consisting of ice cream covered with lightly brown