Cake on FIRE!!!

As you can probably tell from this video, it's Kinzie's birthday (Bryan's sister), well, technically it was Saturday but we celebrated it on Sunday. After a lovely beach picnic, we returned back to the house for a BAKED ALASKA (or baked Alaskan, I'm not sure, though I like the additional connotations of the latter). Now, before I became a Kramer I was not familiar with this dessert. I'm not sure how I made it into my 20s without knowing about a desert where your pour FLAMING BRANDY on top of a cake, but my life is much more complete now that I've witnessed it.

I don't have a recipe for it per se, (Susan want to hook us up?) but I do understand the basic construction which I will explain here.

Basically you bake some angel food cake and layer 1/2 into the bottom of a glass baking dish. You then mound ice cream on top of the cake (the one above had chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip and chocolate). This is then topped with the remaining angel food cake so that it creates a mountain. You then whip up some meringue and spread it on top of the cake layer. This is to seal in the ice cream for the next step and because it's very tasty. The next step involves placing the mountain under a broiler for like maybe 10 minutes (I wasn't really paying attention) while you heat the brandy in a small pot). Now the final and best step is to light a match and set the brandy on fire. This fire is then poured over the cake so that in the case of a birthday, you don't blow out candles but the whole cake.

There is no more entertaining dessert on the planet. Seriously, I dare you to come up with something more fun than pouring flaming brandy on an ice cream cake.