Allergy Warning: This Product Contains Dairy

I have been dreaming about making a Tres Leche cake for the past week now, ever since I had a piece at my friend's birthday dinner at Cafe Habana City. It was the third, maybe fourth time I'd ever tried it...and boy was it goooood. A simple description of tres leche (or leches) cake? How about a sinfully rich slab of sweet milky deliciousness? Filled with condensed milk, evaporated milk, and cream/half-and-half/whole milk (it depends on the recipe), it's got more milks than you can shake a stick at. If you're even slightly lactose intolerant, don't even think about eating or even looking at it. Or do it anyway, like I do, knowing full well that you're going to give yourself a tummy ache. It's worth it.

This really should've been posted with the last post, since it was part of the baking bonanza that occurred yesterday. However, it wasn't ready until today since the milk mixture had to soak into the cake overnight. My sister and I both peeped anxiously at the cake as it was resting in the fridge, wondering why it should soak so long and what would happen if we just eat it now??? Would we create a tear in the space-time continuum? That's a risk we weren't willing to take. It was a long hard wait, but we made it! It's an odd, odd thing...but even after pouring over 3 cups of liquid over it the cake seemed dry. Huh? Definitely not like the restaurant ones :(

Wanna make your own? Try out Alton Brown's recipe. He's a generally trustworthy guy, if you ignore my cranberry muffin incident. (Yes, I know this is the second time I've referenced it, but how can I ever forget something like that?) I did make some changes though (don't I always?)...instead of half-and-half I used a mixture of heavy cream and 2% milk. After all, half-and-half stands for half milk, half cream. Duh. The recipe calls for a cup, but half-and-half only comes in pint containers and I hate to buy more than I know I'll use. I hate to waste, so I used half a cup of cream out of my pint of heavy cream and made the difference up in milk. Of course that meant reducing the topping, but believe me--it still made plenty. I used 1/4 cup powdered sugar instead of the 8 ounces of granulated sugar called for. That would've just put it over the top. ^_^

On a side note, I'm pretty happy with how the photo came out. I have the broken cover of our kitchen skylight to thank for that, because it cast a mega beam of sunshine juuust in the right spot on my counter.