Baked Alaska

Baked Alaska, also known as Bombe Alaska, omelette norvégienne, omelette surprise, or omelette sibérienne depending on the country, is a dessert consisting of ice cream and cake topped with browned meringue. The dish is made of ice cream placed in a pie dish, lined with slices of sponge cake or Christmas pudding, and topped with meringue. After having been placed in the freezer, the entire dessert is then placed in an extremely hot oven for a brief time, long enough to firm and caramelize the meringue but not long enough to begin melting the ice cream. Another common method of browning the meringue is to torch the dessert, sometimes even lighting it on fire for presentational purposes. The name "baked Alaska" was supposedly coined in 1876 at Delmonico's, a restaurant in New York City, to honor the acquisition by the United States of Alaska from the Russian Empire in March 1867. However, the restaurant's original recipe was called "Alaska Florida" , not "Baked Alaska". The dish is also known as an omelette à la norvégienne, or "Norwegian omelette", which similarly refers to the cold climate of Norway. Indeed, during the Paris World's Fair in 1867, the chef of the Grand Hôtel decided to create a "scientific dessert" by using Benjamin Thompson's discovery of the low thermal conductivity of egg whites. Thompson lived in Bavaria at the time of his discovery, and as the chef thought Bavaria was in Norway, he decided to name the dish "Norwegian omelette".

Source: Wikipedia