Pastel de Tres Leches

Pouring tasty liquids over baked goods is a fine dessert strategy. Tiramisu might be fancier, but it is hard to beat a good tres leches. Basically, we have an angel food cake soaked in three different types of milk and frosted. It's like somebody put the vanilla ice cream on top of your cake and let it sit a bit, in the good way.

First off, a warning: this recipe takes about 10 hours. You cannot start making this the night you want it. 


1. Combine slightly more than 1 1/2 cups cake flour, 1 teaspoon of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. (If you don't have cake flour, use 1.5 cups exactly of all purpose flour and 2 tablespoons of corn starch. You'll end up with a stiffer cake, most likely. )

2. Set the flour mixture aside.

3. Beat a stick of unsalted butter until it is fluffy.

4. Beat into the 1 1/8 cups sugar into the butter.

5. Beat 5 eggs into the butter/sugar. Nice and slow, one at a time.

6. Mix in 1/2 TBSP of vanilla.

7. Combine the flour mixture into the butter mixture about 1/3 at a time. Don't over-beat. Seriously.

8. Put this into a greased and floured 13x9 pan, and stick this into a 350 degree oven. It's not a lot of batter, don't worry about that.

9. Bake this until it's golden, about 25 minutes.

10. Pull the cake out and let it cool.

11. Poke the cake with a fork so that there are a bunch of holes for the milk to go.

12. Whisk together a can of evaporated milk (12 oz size), a can of sweetened condensed milk (14 oz size), and 1 cup of half and half. (Or 1/2 cup whole milk and 1/2 cup cream.)

13. Pour that all over the cake, and toss it in the fridge. The cake will soak up all that liquid if you give it about 8 hours.

14. Now, we are going to make some frosting! Combine 2 cups of heavy cream, 1 cup of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla. Whip that on low till you see stiff peaks.

15. Whip that on medium until it is nice and thick, then spread it on the cake.

16. Throw the cake back into the fridge, until you are ready to serve it.