today on america's test kitchen bridget and julia make a show-stopping baked alaska dan dives into baked alaska thermodynamics adam reviews ice cream machines with julia and lisa test offset spatulas it's all coming up on america's test kitchen today we're baking ice cream now there are many reasons that baked alaska is usually made in restaurants and made it for many years in restaurant kitchens and that's because there are tons of moving parts you've got a cake base a dome of ice cream and then you slather it with meringue then it goes and it gets browned now there are a lot of problems with this dish as well it's too sweet you've got vanilla cake vanilla ice cream and vanilla flavor meringue all very sweet and one dimensional also often that meringue will not stick right onto that ice cream you go to slather it put in the oven just slumps right off and then there's the idea that you gotta set it on fire at the table which sounds fun but actually could be kind of a fire hazard again best leave that to the professionals we're going to make a much easier version much safer version we're going to start with two pints of coffee ice cream we're going to use the shapes of these pint containers to our advantage and now that's premium coffee ice cream so it melts more slowly and i'm imagining that's a big deal that is a huge deal exactly i'm going to release the coffee from its natural habitat just use scissors cut it around and i'm putting these so that the wider parts are close to each other i'm going to pick up this plastic and kind of press them together just so that they start to stick it's an ice cream barrel that's exactly what it looks like it's kind of like a root beer barrel so now i've got them stuck together i'm just going to press this to get rid of that barrel shape we want a cylinder not a barrel so i'm going to roll this up going to put it in the freezer but we want to set it on one end i don't want to set it on this long end because it can start to flatten in the freezer ah you'd have a flat side we really want this to refirm that's going to take about an hour ice cream's chilling time to bake the cake so we're going with a chiffon cake love chiffon cake yoga of cakes it can bend it can bend yes exactly i've got here a cup of cake flour cake flour is very important for chiffon cakes much less gluten than all-purpose flour so it's going to give us a lighter crumb to this i'll mix a third cup of unsweetened cocoa and you can use dutch process or non-dutch process also have a third cup of sugar one and a half teaspoons of baking powder a little extra lift and a quarter teaspoon of just plain old salt whisk this together quickly just trying to get out any cocoa lumps all right so now we're going to add our liquid ingredients we're using vegetable oil it's a half a cup right in that's going to keep that crumb nice and moist and six tablespoons of water just a little extra liquid here and four egg yolks right in there whisk this together it looks like a brownie mix doesn't it that smells good quite far from vanilla isn't it yes so now let's move on over to the electric mixer chiffon cakes are leavened with whipped egg whites so they have a really nice light texture i'm going to turn the mixer on to medium-low so i have four of the egg whites already in here just want to break apart the egg whites it's kind of like when you stretch a balloon before you blow into it all right so those egg whites are loosened up a little bit foamy i'm going to crank this to medium high we're going to let it go about another minute this time i'm looking for those egg whites to really start to build up in shape you can see that the egg whites definitely have increased in volume nice and soft i'm going to gradually add 1 3 cup of granulated sugar another minute or two on medium high until the egg whites form soft peaks so let's move back over to our chocolate batter now this batter is pretty heavy if we were to add all the egg whites at once they would deflate exactly so i'm going to add a third of these whipped egg whites right into there just to loosen that batter i'll just use my whisk and work it in so doing this is going to lighten the batter so that we can add the rest of the egg whites without the fear of you're tempering it yes we'll go ahead and add the rest all at once and now i'm going to use a rubber spatula and fold this in and i want to be pretty gentle with this i don't want to start beating down those egg whites and i also want to look to make sure that i don't have too many streaks of white so this batter is going to go into an 18 by 13 inch rimmed baking sheet now i've gone ahead and greased this layer of parchment and more vegetable oil spray right on top a little offset spatula you could use a rubber spatula as well just to get it to the edges so now i'm going to put this in a 350 degree oven it won't be in there for very long maybe 10 13 minutes but what i'm looking for is when i press on the center of the cake it's going to spring back in our baked alaska recipe we're wrapping the entire ice cream core in cake so the kind of cake we choose is actually really important now there are three things we need in this cake insulation flexibility and the right sweetness level now all of that landed us on four contenders we have genoise chiffon pound cake and while technically not a cake brownie i've got all of these sitting here on a 400 degree grill with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top to see each cake's insulating power in action while heat transfers when molecules bump into each other in a solid tightly packed molecules bump into each other frequently so heat transfers quickly on the other hand the molecules in air are fewer and far between they bump into each other less frequently which slows down the transfer of heat making air a better insulator than a solid all cakes contain small pockets of air but some contain much more air than others now check this out the brownie is way too dense to insulate well we want brownies to be chewy and dense not light and cakey and that means keeping the air and its insulating power to a minimum the pound cake it's also a terrible insulator it's packed with moisture and fat as you can see it's starting to dribble ice cream onto the griddle but look at the genoise and chiffon they're still going strong they're definitely winning this race that's because they contain more insulating air bubbles and that keeps the ice cream colder they're both leavened by an egg foam genoise uses whole eggs and chiffon just whites but the result is the same there's lots of air trapped within the egg foam resulting in an airy light cake now either one of these could have worked in the end we chose chiffon for slightly richer flavor and more tender texture no pretty cake i just smell a little bit of that chocolate oh yeah now let me check and make sure that the cake is done so if i take my fingers right in the center it should just spring back oh yeah look at that you don't want to under bake this cake because as you go to roll it if it's too moist on the inside you'll just have fudge around the ice cream sounds like a great thing but it's too messy so we're going to leave this here for about five minutes let it cool in the pan before we turn it out that's going to allow the cake to firm up because right now it's too fragile to flip all right this is cooled five minutes time to turn it out i've got another wire rack greased it so that when i go to reinvert this it won't stick to this rack so we're gonna place this right on top i'm just going to loosen the edges with a knife and i'm going to flip it out et voila move it over now i want to carefully peel off that parchment hello pretty cake oh look at that oh yeah and now i'm going to reinvert flippity-dippity nicely done so this is going to stay here until it cools completely and that's going to take 15 minutes all right the cake has cooled completely time for a little arts and crafts we're going to cut out our shapes to completely encapsulate our ice cream so we need to get all of our shapes out of this sheet it's very easy to do first of all i just want to trim off one of these edges here just to clean it up so about a quarter inch in so now i want to measure in four and a half inches from the edge and there we go so i'm going to score this with my knife i love it when it lines up with one of these grids from the cooling rack that is just brilliant i'll go ahead and cut this and now i want this piece to measure 11 inches across so depending on the size of your sheet pan and how much it's shrunk in the oven it might measure just about 11 inches and you'll love it spot on so from this new cut mark i'm going to go in four inches and cut that right through now this one i want to measure 10 inches in length there we go for the rest of this all i need is one three and a half inch circle and a biscuit cutter works perfectly here stamp it out and pop there's our circle all right so i'm going to clean up here move these scraps over but if you wouldn't mind going and getting the ice cream out of the freezer for me well this guy's nice and hard coffee log all right i want the size of this ice cream to match the size of this cake so this was four and a half inches wide there we go i'll take my knife and just cut right through it all right now i'm going to put this little bit of ice cream on the plate with those chocolate cake scraps the rest of the log goes right onto our cake and now i'm going to roll it up it's okay if it cracks a little bit and it will crack a little bit it will harm no foul because meringue covers all sins right now i'm going to take this little circle and we're going to put it just on one end i'm going to go ahead and wrap this back up now i want to put it on cake side down wrap it back up pretty tightly because we want this to start really forming that log shape at this point right so this is going to go back in the freezer we want to let that ice cream set back up get really nice and hard to another 30 minutes at least now also the scraps that we have over here we are not throwing these away so this little bit of ice cream and this cake is enough to make a baked alaska for two oh and you can find that mini baked alaska recipe on our website americastestkitchen.com so this needs to go in the freezer this needs to go in the freezer at least 30 minutes all right our cake and ice cream fully frozen and you can see how when i compressed it together a lot of those cracks really just come together you don't see them at all so i'm going to take a knife eyeball half and slice right through all right so now these are going to go on that cake remember this was the one that was four inches across 10 inches long it's all coming clear so now these are the ends with the cake these go right here on the outside this construction project finally made sense to me now that these are all together take the plastic and this time i just want to gently push this together so i'm going to wrap this back up here's the good news this is going to go back in the freezer for another two hours but you can actually do it up to this point up to two weeks in advance if you want to make real ice cream at home well you're going to need a good ice cream maker and there's a lot of styles and prices to choose from adam and you're right there are a lot of ice cream makers to choose from we have a lineup of six different models here and they're very different they are very different the price range was pretty wide this was the lowest at about 34. this one in front of you was the highest at almost 400 399.95 these three here all have a canister that you have to take out and put into the freezer you pre-freeze that before you can use the maker the one down at the end is an attachment to our favorite kitchenaid stand mixer that's the same principle you have to take that whole thing off pre-freeze it before you can use it these two have freezers built right in ooh i kind of like that and we had a panel of tasters assembled to do blind tastings of these things best tasting ever and really the tasters were paying attention to texture they were looking for something dense smooth creamy and free of crystals and that links to the design of the paddle inside all of these have a paddle that runs around and around it scrapes the ice cream off the sides of the canister to mix it back into the base to keep it churning and if you have a paddle that has a crossbar right up at the top like that what happened is that would catch the mixture and the mixture would ride on top of the surface that's not good not good so we had to stop and push the mixture back into the canister also we like to use an instant read thermometer to find out when it reaches 21 degrees which is the magic temperature for churning and chilling and because this crossbar is right at the top in order to put an instant read thermometer in there we had to stop the machine a better design is this one you can see that the crossbar is about halfway down the paddle so we had none of the mixture riding around on the surface we didn't have to stop it to take the temperature you know both of these types of machines have their pros and their cons the pros for these guys is that they're less expensive they work pretty quickly it's a nice small footprint the con is obviously that you have to take off this canister yeah 24 hours in advance raise it overnight and have space in your freezer good point if there's not air circulation it won't freeze efficiently now the advantages to these guys over here are that you can do batch after batch after batch without worrying about pre-freezing any canisters the disadvantage is they're heavy they're big and they're a lot more expensive being that they all made pretty good frozen desserts this was our overall winner this is the cuisinart ice cream sorbet and frozen yogurt maker it's about 53.99 you do have to pre-freeze the canister but it's got the right kind of paddle inside it's got a nice small footprint it worked pretty quickly it just made really good frozen desserts we don't have a problem with that if you are an ice cream aficionado and you have the money to burn on a really good machine with a built-in freezer this one is the breville smart scoop 399.95 for the high flying ice cream lover so there you have it if you're in the market for a new ice cream maker you have two good choices the cuisinart frozen yogurt ice cream and sorbet maker at about 54. or consider the breville smart scoop at about 400 bucks so far we've got cake and ice cream right but it's not baked alaska unless it's coated with meringue so i've got three egg whites right in here you can see over here i've got a double boiler it's a saucepan i've got about an inch of simmering water in there you don't want to fill a double boiler too full you want to make sure that the bottom of this bowl is going to sit above that water otherwise it'll cook these eggs too quickly i do need to add a few ingredients starting with three quarter cup of sugar a third of a cup of light corn syrup corn syrup is actually less sweet than sugar so we're going to still have some sweetness it's going to give it a great texture it's not going to be as sweet as regular meringue then we have two tablespoons of water and a pinch of salt just mix this to break it all up all right let's put this on the double boiler i'm going to whisk this gently but constantly for about five minutes now what i'm really looking for is the temperature of this mixture should reach 160 degrees and that's how we know it's safe to eat so when you're making a swiss meringue slow and low is the tempo because you don't want to overshoot that 160 degrees or else you'll hard cook the eggs all right we're just moments away from that magic number of 160 and this always does tend to cook a little fast near the end there we go we're going to take this off immediately if not sooner and fit it on our big stand mixer with the whisk attachment at this point we're just trying to cool this mixture down so we'll let it go on medium speed for about five minutes all right our mixture has cooled down now it looks awesome doesn't it it's all soft and puffy now at this point i'm going to increase the speed to high we're going to let it go another five minutes and that meringue should start to lose some of its gloss at that point check out this consistency oh yes it's got really nice stiff peaks now we're going to add one more ingredient it's a teaspoon of vanilla extract right at the end we're just going to let this go for about another minute really i'm just looking for that vanilla to be combined into the meringue and that is it for our meringue we're ready to frost our cake now i did go ahead and take this cake out just a few minutes ago you want to let it sit out for a little bit of time because meringue sticks a lot better to slightly less cold surfaces than straight out of the freezer so now we cover and we're going to cover all of our sins all the cracks everything that we didn't need to worry about before so i'm going to do a little bit of a plop job at the beginning my kind of frosting job oh yeah messy on purpose that's right i'm going to try to avoid getting that meringue onto the rack because meringue is also used in the pastry world as glue point that meringue just stays in place it's not very droopy it's gorgeous isn't it it is gorgeous here's where the fun starts i'm going to take a spoon we're going to turn this baked alaska which already looks pretty darn good into something that is gorgeous i'm going to give it peaks and valleys and that way when it browns you're going to have this different colors all over this baked alaska so just taking the back of a spoon there is no wrong way to do this i like to continue to do this until it kind of looks like an ice cream hedgehog so this is going to go into an oven and not a broiler foiler would make it kind of spotty brown but the 500 degree oven is going to give it more of an even browning of course we're going to have those peaks they're going to get a little bit more toasting it's only going to be in there for five minutes if you're like me you grew up trying to frost cakes with a butter knife i never could get my cakes to look as beautiful as bakery cakes so when i learned about offset spatulas wow that's the secret weapon this long narrow blade is perfect for scooping and spreading frosting it's got an offset bend near the handle that's there to give you great leverage and it keeps your hands clean now we tested six they were priced from about six to ten dollars and we slathered jelly on dozens of jelly rolls we covered cake after cake with frostings of different textures and here's what mattered first blade length you want seven to eight inches that's what you're looking for with a flat part of about six and a half inches this length really gives you good coverage when you're frosting a layer cake and it's great because you can still fit in the pan when you're frosting a sheet cake now second you really want to look at the angle of the blade blades offset to about 30 degrees of what you want some of these were too flat to keep our hands out of the frosting and some of these were really too steep and it was really awkward to frost the sides of the cake a third it should be very very thin which is just right for sliding under a cake layer and should have a moderate amount of flex you don't want it too rigid or too flimsy now this is our favorite and it had it all it's got a good blade length a moderate angle it's thin but strong and best of all it's got this extra comfy grippy rubber handle it's called the oxo good grips bent icing knife for 9.99 you'll be frosting cakes like a pro surprise oh that is a good party trick oh yes oh that looks so cool so excited i know i'm so happy for you we've got to get this off of that hot pan i'm going to work in there with two spatulas there we go happy days are here again i almost hate to cut into this but there's a lot of good stuff inside i can't wait to try this so i'm going to score it because that top meringue is just a little bit crispy and then straight through [Laughter] check it out that is so cool i'm going to give you this beautiful piece yeah all right first bite baked alaska the meringue the texture of the meringue it's like a cloud a little bit of crunch and then it dissipates and you're left with the ice cream underneath okay that's amazing this is so different though because i've had so many sweet baked alaskas i mean they should be called baked sugar this is perfect that coffee ice cream a little bit of adult maybe i've grown up everybody needs to taste a real baked alaska at least once in their life and for the ultimate version start by shaping the ice cream into a cylindrical shape then make a flat chocolate chiffon cake that's easy to mold around the ice cream finally cover the entire thing with swiss meringue and bake it in a hot oven until it's nicely browned and there you have it from the test kitchen to your kitchen the ultimate recipe for baked alaska you can get this recipe all the recipes from this season along with our tastings testings and selected episodes on our website americastestkitchen.com thanks for watching america's test kitchen what'd you think well leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or you can just say hello you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later i'll see you later