Baked Alaska

Baked Alaska is a dessert of ice cream surrounded by insulating cake and/or meringue, which can then be heated or even flambéed and brought to the table as a hot dessert that is cold inside. The general idea seems to have been developed by chefs in the eighteenth century and linked to two Americans at the turn of the nineteenth century. Thomas Jefferson is supposed to have served an ice cream dessert encased in hot pastry in 1802, while Count Rumford, an American Tory who had moved to Europe, supposedly developed an “omelette surprise” using meringue in Monaco in 1804.