Baked Alaska

        Well, it would be truly wrong to write about the cakes without also relating the most famous story of them all. It goes all the way back to the beginning. S is a dear friend, but he begged me not to make a cake for him. I explained that everyone got a cake – I couldn't pick and choose who to make cakes for – and besides, the birthday person really isn't the center of attention – the gang just wants an excuse to visit with each other for a few minutes and eat cake. S had no choice but to give in. However, he tried to suggest difficult cakes to make.

        One year he asked for a peanutbutter cake. It was the late 90's, a time before the internet was readily available to all - I went to the local library to look up recipes for a peanutbutter cake. There are a few, but I was afraid none of them would work well in the big pan – I made something else for him instead while offering apologies.

        The next year S requested Baked Alaska! All I knew about Baked Alaska is that it is something fancy and fire might be involved. Yeah well that was not going to happen. I decided to just bake a regular cake with a plain frosting and call it the anti-Baked Alaska.

        But then an idea came to mind. I took the white frosting, and in freehand, I smoothed the frosting across the top right corner and over to the middle of the cake kind of in the shape of the state of Alaska, including, somewhat, the archipelago. I liked the result – so then I took the rest of the frosting and added blue food coloring and painted the rest of the cake with the blue ocean to the west and south of Alaska. Again I liked the results. I did not know if anyone else would “get it” but at least I had amused myself.

        When S came into the breakroom after cake had been announced, he took one look at it and said, “it's Baked Alaska.”

        One of the finest moments in my life!

        S moved out of town not too long after that – across the country, and even for a while he lived in Alaska. For a few years, on his birthday, he would call me at work and mention again the Baked Alaska. You can't imagine how much that meant to me. Two years ago, S invited Mike and me to his fiftieth birthday party – living these days in South Carolina – in the midst of all the great food and alcohol, the Baked Alaska story was mentioned at least once!

220 20150808 Baked Alaska