Baked Alaska is a dessert made of ice cream

Ice cream

Ice cream is a frozen dessert usually made from dairy products, such as milk and cream, and often combined with fruits or other ingredients and flavours. Most varieties contain sugar, although some are made with other sweeteners...

 placed in a pie dish lined with slices of sponge cake

Sponge cake

Sponge cake is a cake based on flour , sugar, and eggs, sometimes leavened with baking powder which has a firm, yet well aerated structure, similar to a sea sponge. A sponge cake may be produced by either the batter method, or the foam method. Typicially the batter method in the U.S. is known as a...

 or Christmas pudding

Christmas pudding

Christmas pudding is a pudding traditionally served on Christmas Day . It has its origins in medieval England, and is sometimes known as plum pudding or plum duff, though this can also refer to other kinds of boiled pudding involving dried fruit.-Basics:Many households have their own recipe for...

 and topped with meringue

Meringue

Meringue is a type of dessert made from whipped egg whites and sugar, occasionally some recipes may call for adding an acid such as cream of tartar or a small amount of vinegar and a binding agent such as cornstarch found in icing sugar which may be added in addition to the corn starch which...

. The entire dessert is then placed in an extremely hot oven

Oven

An oven is a thermally insulated chamber used for the heating, baking or drying of a substance. It is most commonly used for cooking. Kilns, and furnaces are special-purpose ovens...

 for just long enough to firm the meringue. The meringue is an effective insulator

Thermal insulation

Thermal insulation is the reduction of the effects of the various processes of heat transfer between objects in thermal contact or in range of radiative influence. Heat transfer is the transfer of thermal energy between objects of differing temperature...

, and the short cooking time prevents the heat from getting through to the ice cream.

The name 'Baked Alaska' was coined at Delmonico's Restaurant

Delmonico's Restaurant

Delmonico's is the name of series of restaurants of varying duration, quality, and fame located in New York City. The original and most famous was operated by the Delmonico family during the 19th and early 20th centuries, closing due to a Prohibition-era slowdown in 1923...

 in 1876 to honor the recently acquired American territory. Both the name 'Baked Alaska' and 'omelette à la norvégienne'/'Norwegian omelette' come from the low temperatures of Alaska and Norway.

February 1 is Baked Alaska Day in the United States.

Origin

The Chinese first had the idea of a similar dessert, which used pastry instead of meringue. It was the French who brought in the meringue and made the actual first Baked Alaska, which they called omelette à la norvégienne ("Norwegian omelette").

Variations

A variation called Bombe Alaska calls for some dark rum

Rum

Rum is a distilled alcoholic beverage made from sugarcane by-products such as molasses, or directly from sugarcane juice, by a process of fermentation and distillation. The distillate, a clear liquid, is then usually aged in oak barrels...

 to be splashed over the Baked Alaska. Lights are then turned down and the whole dessert is flambé

Flambé

Flambé is a cooking procedure in which alcohol is added to a hot pan to create a burst of flames. The word means flamed in French ....

ed while being served.

The process was simplified in 1974 by Jacqueline Halliday Diaz who invented a baking pan for Baked Alaska called Cūlinique that forms a fillable hollow in the cake that may be filled with ice cream.

In 1969, the recently invented microwave oven

Microwave oven

A microwave oven is a kitchen appliance that heats food by dielectric heating, using microwave radiation to heat polarized molecules within the food...

 enabled Hungarian physicist and molecular gastronomist

Molecular gastronomy

Molecular gastronomy is a subdiscipline of food science that seeks to investigate, explain and make practical use of the physical and chemical transformations of ingredients that occur while cooking, as well as the social, artistic and technical components of culinary and gastronomic phenomena in...

 Nicholas Kurti

Nicholas Kurti

Professor Nicholas Kurti FRS was a Hungarian-born physicist who lived in Oxford, UK, for most of his life. In his era, he was one of the leading experimental physicists....

to produce a reverse Baked Alaska (also called a "Frozen Florida")—a frozen shell of meringue filled with hot liquor.