Sunday, March 4, 2012

Tres Leches Cake con Dulce de Leche


Tres Leches Cake: all-purpose flour, baking powder, egg whites, egg yolks, sugar, sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, heavy cream
Dulce de Leche: whole milk, sugar, cinnamon 

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Such a sweet dessert! You really could barely eat half of a serving of this stuff... not for the faint of heart. The great thing about this cake is that it's not heavy and thick, like a pound cake, but very light and airy. The sponginess of the cake is of course what soaks up all the cream and sugar that you pretty much immerse this in.

Almost like a light angel food cake, I pretty much followed the recipe from Food and Wine exactly. It was very quick and very easy; beat the egg whites and the egg yolks separately, then combine with the flour. The oven does the rest of the work. 

The leches was even more simple - all you need is a can opener and a whisk and you're done (I omitted the rum it asked for, but you can easily add some in!). The fun part is inverting the cake to cool on a platter, and then pouring the leches mixture all over it. I poked the top of the cake with a fork, to add holes to it, but it doesn't make for anything particularly attractive. But it gets all the leches in there! Make sure to let it soak overnight.

The Dulce de Leche sauce was the hard part, mostly because it called for a lot of sugar, a lot of whole milk, and A LOT of stirring. And I mean stirring the mixture for about 50 minutes still didn't yield the thick sauce I wanted. I finally gave up and let it sit in the fridge overnight; by morning it tasted great (but still a little runny).

I served this for a friend's birthday dinner recently and there was plenty to go around. Goes great with some espresso or cuban coffee.

2 comments:

  1. YUMMMMMMMM!!!! So when are we coming over for dinner?

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  2. This looks awesome.

    My favorite Tres Leches cake (Whole Foods in Austin) has a seven-minute meringue frosting on top, just drizzled with dulce de leche. Also, you can make dulce de leche by baking a can of sweetened condensed milk until it carmelizes, like by spreading it out in a pan. Super easy.

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