I recently made a tres leches cake, and I have mixed feelings on the execution.
The recipe I used tasted good, so that wasn’t the problem, and I think the decoration (such as it was) wasn’t too bad. My main point of contention however is probably the most important part of the cake: the soak. When we first cut into the cake the day after it was made, I felt that only part of the cake was properly soaked and that part of it was dry. The cake itself tasted fine, but when it comes to tres leches you really want the cake to be nice and well soaked, maybe even leave a little milk puddle on the plate once you are done eating. The more well soaked the better! I did have another piece of leftover cake two days later and that piece was perfect – fully soaked with the milk mixture, not so damp it was falling apart but well hydrated. I’m not sure if it was execution or time that caused the difference, since the two pieces I had came from different halves of the cake sheet pan.
To back track a bit, the cake I made wasn’t the one I usually did. It was different in that I usually make a pretty standard yellow cake (where the eggs are beaten in to the batter in one go), while the recipe I found had you separate the egg yolk from the egg whites. The yolks gotten beaten with the sugar and flavoring before the flour was added, then the egg whites were beaten into stiff peaks and then folded into the yolk and flour batter. It made a delicious cake, but I’m not sure if the difference in preparation meant that I didn’t properly prepare the cake for the soak and thats why parts of the cake felt like they were dry.
I didn’t think it would be the timing, since the recipe itself said it would be ready in 30 minutes and I gave the cake a full overnight to soak in the fridge. Since one half of the cake got the correct amount of soak and the other half got stiffed then the application of the milk for the tres leches would likely be the issue. In that situation, one way to fix the issue would be to add more of the milk mixture, but I used a whole can of evaporated milk and condensed milk along with heavy cream for the original soak. Other than adding more heavy cream I can’t think of a good way to add more liquid, as no recipe I’ve made before used more than one can of both the condensed and evaporated milk. Aside from how much liquid that would come from doubling the milk mixture, there is also the point for just how sweet that would make the cake. Tres Leches is sweet, but that would be way too much sugar for even me to handle.
the only other option would be that I didn’t prepare the cake well enough before pouring the soak onto it. Preparing the tres leches cake isn’t rocket science – you literally just poke the cake with five dozen holes so that the milk can soak through evenly. If my spacing for the holes were uneven or concentrated more on one side than the other then that could have contributed to the difference in the two halves of the cake.
I think in order to get to the bottom of the issue I’m just going to have to make the tres leches again to test what the issue was. It’s a hard job, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make (for science, of course!).
