The Great British Bake Off Week Four - Baked Alaska

Well, what a show week four brought. After all of the drama of Iain, Diana and the 'bincident' there was only one bake that I could choose to feature this week... baked alaska! Let's hope I manage to keep my cool better than Iain.

Ingredients
5oz margarine
6½oz caster sugar
1½oz cocoa powder
2oz self raising flour
mini marshmallows
2 eggs
vanilla ice cream

For the meringue
2 egg whites
4oz caster sugar

To start with you have to make the cake base. I decided chocolate brownie would make a nice sturdy and tasty base. I used a simple recipe which involved combining the margarine, sugar, cocoa powder, flour and eggs together in a large bowl, sifting the cocoa and flour first to avoid lumps. When mixed thoroughly, stir in the marshmallows and then pour into a round cake tin. Preheat the oven to 180°C and then bake the brownie mixture for approximately 40 minutes, checking after 30 minutes as you don't want to over bake it.

Once baked, leave to completely cool before going on to the next stage as you don't want your ice cream to melt before you've even had a chance to put the meringue on! At this point I decided to make my cake base smaller by cutting round a smaller bowl as I had less people available to feed. During this time you can also prepare your meringue. Separate the egg whites of 2 eggs into a bowl and whisk with an electric mixer until fluffy. Then gradually add the sugar whilst still whisking to make a stiff, glossy mixture.

When your cake is cold, transfer it to a lined baking tray. Now scoop ice cream in a mound on top, leaving a border of cake around it so that it doesn't leak. Unlike on GBBO, I chose not to make my own ice cream. Attempting to make baked alaska for the first time is hard enough, I think I'll leave making my own ice cream for another day! Now completely cover the ice cream and cake with your meringue, making sure that there are no gaps. This is where the problems with my meringue started to become apparent. I'd either under or over whisked my egg whites meaning that the mixture didn't stay put and definitely wasn't mouldable, meaning that I couldn't create decorative swirls on the meringue top like I'd planned.

It's now time to bake. This part worries me because... hello... there's ice cream in there! Put your alaska in the oven for around 7 minutes, just enough to cook the meringue but not melt the ice cream. My problems went further downhill from here. During the baking, the liquid meringue slid off the top, exposing my ice cream which subsequently started to melt. In the end I made an executive decision to take the bake out of the oven to try and salvage what was left of the ice cream before that melted too! As you can see what was left was a meringue-y, creamy mess! And it tasted as such, although the brownie base was delicious if I do say so myself.

So what did I learn from this recipe? Baking something for the first time doesn't mean that it will be a success, make sure that my meringue texture is perfect before baking and most importantly... keeping your cool and not throwing a ruined bake in the bin means you can still eat the unspoiled parts like the brownie. Sorry Iain!

Next week is pie/tart week. Fingers crossed I'm more successful next time.