There’s plenty of ice cream on North 45th Street in Wallingford. In a few bustling blocks you get a Molly Moon’s , a Fainting Goat for gelato, Purple Cow for Hokkaido-style soft serve, and Dick’s if you want a classic fast-food milkshake. But the most interesting ice cream on the street is on the dessert menu at Atoma , which might be the only restaurant in Seattle making baked Alaskas. It’s definitely the only place where the baked Alaskas are infused with corn.

A baked Alaska is an old-fashioned dessert where cake and ice cream are entombed in a layer of meringue, which is then charred right before it’s served so diners get a layer of warm, sugary meringue on top of cold ice cream. The dish is usually said to have originated in New York City’s famed Delmonico’s in the 1880s, but according to Atlas Obscura it’s likely much older than that; the idea of cooking ice cream under a layer of something probably comes from China. In any case it’s a deliberately showy, theatrical dessert that appeals to people who like their food with a side of novelty. Sometimes baked Alaskas are even set alight at the table.

You don’t get the tableside fireworks at Atoma — they would probably detract from the homespun, cozy vibe of the dining room, which is inside a converted house. The flash comes instead from the ingredients: When Atoma opened in November 2023, for instance, the baked Alaska featured parsnip ice cream, a tarragon meringue, and a carrot cake. But just as the menu rotates with the seasons, the baked Alaska had to change.

“As much as I like that parsnip Alaska that we opened with, I can’t get parsnips in the summer,” says Atoma co-owner Johnny Courtney, who runs the kitchen. “Well, I can, but they’re not coming from a farmer whose hand I can shake at the farmers market, you know?”

The dessert’s current incarnation is nicknamed the “corn Alaska,” Courtney says, and it was inspired by tres leches cake. It starts with a corn cake that is soaked in a corn-infused milk. The ice cream is made from milk that is smoked and then infused with corn. The ice cream sets overnight in a mold, then the team scoops out the center of the ice cream and sets the remainder on top of the cake, which is frozen briefly. The center of the ice cream is filled with huckleberry jam and caramel corns are studded throughout. But wait, we’re not done with the corn yet: The silk from the leftover husks is charred, turned into a powder that is then turned into sugar, and that sugar is used to make the meringue, which goes over everything and is cooked, then finally dusted with the charred corn silk power for good measure. At the very end of this process (which takes two or three days, Courtney says), the baked Alaska is plated with some more huckleberry jam.

The result is packed with corn flavor but also much more sweet than savory, especially when you get one of those buried-treasure caramel corn. The meringue is pleasantly smoky, and the smoky-sweetness of everything is cut perfectly by the tartness of the jam. The fact that corn is at the center of every element of the dessert makes it more like a magic trick than a novelty — how did they do that ?

Courtney — who came up with the corn Alaska alongside pastry chef Nicola Willoughby — says that he’s wanted to have the dessert on the menu since before Atoma existed. When he worked for fine dining superpower Canlis during the pandemic lockdown days, he says, the team was “just making insane desserts for staff meal just to kind of keep busy... We made like a yule log, we made a bananas Foster and we played around with making a couple baked Alaskas, and we found that they were really hard to make for 40 people.”

It “wasn’t exactly Canlis’s vibe,” he says, but “I had that in the back of my mind — hopefully one day I can put that on the menu at my restaurant.”

At $18, it’s the most expensive dessert on Atoma’s menu, but also the most popular. It’s not hard to understand why — it’s the kind of menu item that is unusual enough to attract curiosity. When you see that there’s a baked Alaska with “corn husk meringue [and] corn ice cream” don’t you just kind of have to order it, just to see what comes out?

Atoma has built a strong reputation in less than a year thanks to dishes that, like the baked Alaska, tweak or reinvent classics. Swedish rosette cookies are made savory with the addition of onion jam and white cheese; the XO sauce that has accompanied beef tartare and radish cake is made in house from dried geoduck. There’s a palpable amount of care and consideration that goes into everything here — how many places make meringue from corn silk? — but just as importantly, there’s a sense of joy.