Saturday, April 12, 2014 – Like I said last week, I’m practicing making a Mexican dinner for Cinco de Mayo. And I needed a dessert. And tres leches cake is a traditional Mexican dessert and plays into my cake baking skills.
One of my fellow students at Sizzleworks recommended the book My Sweet Mexico for a recipe for tres leches cake. (The alternative was Good Eats, and I decided to take a chance on something other than Good Eats.)
There are 3 main parts to the tres leches cake: the cake, the tres leches, and the whipped cream frosting. For the cake, I went with a chiffon cake recipe as described by My Sweet Mexico. Mainly because whipping egg whites into a meringue to make a nice light and airy cake is, well, a great way to make a cake. (You might notice that once again, I tore the top off the cake. Oh well.)
The next step is the tres leches. It’s traditionally made with a evaporated milk, condensed milk, and cream. The My Sweet Mexico recipe also recommended adding half a cup of dark rum to add an extra bit of flavor. Long-time readers know I can’t taste alcohol. (I even tried taking a 2oz shot of rum, and I ended up not liking it.) But I decided to add the rum to the tres leches anyway, just to try out the flavor. (In the end, I still ended up not liking it. Maybe next time I should use less rum.)
When I served the cake to my coworkers on Monday (2 days later), the rum flavor mellowed out significantly. Maybe with time, the rum flavor mellows out. But some of my other coworkers noted that the cake still tasted very rummy, and in some parts of the cake, the rum flavor was definitely still there. Still prolly gonna play it safe and use less rum.
And the tres leches gets soaked directly into the cake.
The last step is to make a simple whipped cream frosting, and fill and frost the cake with it. My Sweet Mexico also recommended filling and topping with some sliced fruit, so I went with canned sliced peaches. I think I need more whipped cream to properly frost the cake though. Next time, I should make twice as much whipped cream.
The cake also leaks tres leches everywhere. My Mexican friends tell me that not only is this normal, but that this is a good thing. Except I think I over did it with the tres leches. The cake was so wet, it was hard to work with. A few ideas: (a) bake the cake for a bit longer so it’s drier and tougher (so it absorbs more tres leches) (b) use less tres leches, like maybe use half the tres leches to soak the cake, and reserve the rest to pour over the cake just before serving (c) soak the cake overnight instead of just one hour, so the tres leches cools and helps firm up the cake. I also considered adding a bit of gelatin to the tres leches before soaking the cake. But if tres leches leaking out of the cake is a good thing, then I prolly want my tres leches in liquid form.
In the end, I brought the cake to work on Monday, where it was an instant hit. A very messy instant hit, but still an instant hit. But that’s generally what happens when you bring something to work with lots of sugar, moisture, and fat. And booze, I guess.