Tres Leches 🥛 🍰
Intro to Cake Science + recipe for The Best Tres Leches Cake
Greetings Friends,
End of August is here and with the Summer beginning to fade I wanted to share one of my favorite chilled cakes to serve.
Tres Leches 🥛 🍰
Before we dive into Tres Leches let’s zoom out and talk about some helpful things to know whenever you are baking cakes.
Although I was primarily a savory chef, I was so curious about all things cooking that I spent a few stints working exclusively with pastry and desserts… and far more in bread baking, dough making etc.
It’s one of the things that helped me excel as a cook.
Curiosity
You can be a really good cook if you aren’t curious, but having a natural curiosity (in whatever you are applying yourself to) will cause you to fully focus and be in tune with nuances that will give you intuition.
This is why when cooks used to tell me “Chef, I followed the recipe”, I would get irate.
The recipe is just a foundation. External factors affect any recipe, no matter how well written. Heat, humidity, ingredient freshness, just to name a few.
So being naturally curious and wanting to know all things about food, savory or sweet, I became very appreciative of the pastry arts and even led menu development for my own pastries for many years.
Sweet Skillset
When thinking of good meals.. a bad meal can be rescued by a delicious dessert.
It’s true
And just as first impressions “are everything”, finishing a bad experience with a sweet taste is a flipside to the same coin.
That’s why being able to make at least a few rock solid desserts will elevate your cooking status and confidence.
I’ve got a lot more to say about Pastry, Baking, Doughs etc… but for today, lets talk about Cake 🍰
Let Them Eat Cake 🎂
Cakes have become synonymous with celebrations and special occasions.
Why do we love cake?
Aside from the sweet component, a tender crumb is pleasing to your palate contrasting with fluffy sweet frostings (or icings, glazes)
The world of Cake is large and varying; with something for everyone.
Carrot Cake 🥕 … Lemon Cake 🍋 … Pineapple Upside Down 🍍…. Red Velvet 🍫
Textures can run from light and airy, like Angel Food Cake… to a light sponge cake with raspberry jam and whipped cream.
Fillings could be sandwiched between layers or just a simple icing on top.
Could be 1 layer, 2 layer, 3 layer… 7 layer.
Classic is an enriched yellow layer cake, with a tender crumb and doused in pillowy chocolate frosting… or even a dense and firm Pound Cake that has a light icing or glaze applied to the top.
Primarily when talking cake I think of a batter that is baked and then iced or frosted.
Cake Science 101 🍰 🔬
So what is cake batter rise? How does it rise and set into something magically delicious? 🤔
All questions we will quickly answer ⬇️
Cake Batters
Most cake batters are pourable. Some more thin, others more thick. The magic happens by creating a uniform cake batter that blends wet and dry ingredients together.
When making a cake batter you want to make sure you have achieved these two important qualities:
Emulsified:
You know how water and oil don’t mix? The oil will float to the top of the container and sit above the water.
That’s because water and fats don’t blend willingly. Their chemical structure causes them to repel one another.
Ever seen a broken salad dressing or mayonnaise?
There’s a pool of oil or fat that separated and now you’re left with a bland and greasy mess. When the flat splits, it coats your palate. This is why the broken mixture tastes bland and your palate can’t detect the other flavors.
The same thing happens in cake batters.
Fats (butter, egg yolks, oils) need to blend with water-heavy ingredients (egg whites, dairy, even plain water) and dry ingredients (flours, cocoa powder, leaveners, etc).
In order for them to be cohesive and evenly blended, they need to be emulsified.
Just as you see a cook whisking oil slowly into a salad dressing base of egg yolks, vinegar etc… when making cake batters we must have an emulsified batter, or the end result will greasy and bland.
(2) common causes of breaking an emulsion:
1) over agitation (mixing too much)
2) change in temperature (heat) which causes the fat and water molecules to split.
*More detail on this below
Homogeneous:
We are talking here about a uniform batter. There should not be chunks of unmixed flour, or large whipped egg white streaks. This will affect the quality of the cake and leave you with areas that are bland or chalky.
When doing the final stir in a batter, you should be using a mixing spatula to fold in the flour into the batter. This allows minimal agitation and far less (if any) gluten developed.
*Whisking flour into a batter is usually discouraged. The reason for this is that the whisk will over work the batter causing gluten to develop, making a tough/chewy cake.
Leaveners:
These are what give the batter a lift while baking. Then the heat from the oven sets the structure as steam lifts the batter.
Baking Powder: Combining a bicarbonate (or carbonate) and a weak acid, this produces a release of CO2 that lifts the batter. Cornstarch is mixed in to serve as a buffer to delay the reaction once added to a liquid environment (aka batter).
Baking powder is best used when there are no acidic ingredients in the batter. If used in an acidic batter, the weak acid will not be used in the reaction and can leave a weird aftertaste.
*Use Baking Powder that is Aluminum-free
Baking Soda: Sodium Bicarbonate, this basic (alkaline, or pH > 7) compound works by reacting with acidic ingredients. The reaction produces CO2 (as above) which lifts and lightens the cake batter as it bakes.
Egg Whites: Now we get to one of “Nature’s Leaveners”. The humble egg white. This is a very versatile way to leaven and aerate batters; also a key component in making a proper soufflé. 🙌
Egg whites are made up of water and bundles of proteins (for simplicity sake). When you agitate (whisk) the whites, you start breaking down those bundles of curled of proteins and pushing air in. Creating light pockets. As the beaten egg whites are heated, the trapped air rises with the increased temperature, creating steam which lifts the batter up.
Sounds simple but a few tips to help.
1) room temperature egg whites will whip easier; put your whole eggs in a bowl of room temp water for 5-10 mins to knock off some of the chill before separating.
2) when whipping egg whites we want to make pockets of air that are as uniform as possible. This will make a more stable foam and will rise more evenly. How do we do this? Whip your egg whites on medium speed to start and slowly turn up to medium high. (I’ve known pastry chefs to flip their lids if a cook was in a hurry and beating egg whites at max speed in the mixer 😂).
3) in many cases, cream of tartar can be added to the egg whites as another way to make a much more stable egg white foam, with even pockets of air. Egg whites are slightly alkaline, which makes the proteins clump together when they're whipped, causing the foam to be unstable.
Batter Methods:
Now that we have a basis of what need to achieve, here are (3) popular methods that are used for making cake batter… from lightest to most dense.
Whipped Egg Whites
Most light cakes (Angel food, etc) will have you whip the egg whites to firm or stiff peaks, reserve off to the side. Then you make a batter base to which the whipped egg whites are gently folded in.
Whipped Eggs
The classic Genoise sponge cake 🇫🇷 can be made by whipping whole eggs (adding sugar part way through) together at high speeds for up to 10 mins. The result is a frothy, mousse-like mixture to which flour and other flavorings are folded in before baked.
This is also classic for jelly rolls, and sponges that can be rolled into cylinders. Think Buche de Noel (The classic Christmas log cake).
Creaming
You will see the creaming method not just in layer cakes, but also cookies. Butter and sugar are beaten together (creamed) with a paddle attachment. Then eggs are generally added followed by alternating additions of dry and wet ingredients.
The important thing to remember when using the creaming method is that you need to emulsify the butter and sugar.
Have you ever made a poundcake batter and after creaming the sugar and butter, you add the eggs then the whole mixture splits? Royally sucks…
Why does this happen?
Sugar behaves as a liquid in baking. Even though it starts as crystalline solid, it will eventually melt into a liquid. If we don’t emulsify the butter and sugar, the mixture will be lumpy or broken. Then when you go to bake, all the fat will piss out of the batter (or cookies) because it wasn’t bound together.
To avoid this, use butter that is almost room temperature. If you use fridge cold butter the friction from the mixing paddle will soften the outside of the butter cubes while the interior remains chilled. Makes it a lot more difficult to have an even temperature butter that will emulsify easily with the sugar.
You can also use superfine sugar (if using grams, not volume) and that will incorporate easier than granulated sugar.
Back to the poundcake batter that split. Most of the time the batter splits is because you are adding cold eggs out of the fridge into a creamed butter and sugar that are now at room tempertaure. The cold temperature causes the fat in the butter to seize and separate.
Another factor could be you add the eggs too quickly and the water content breaks the emulsion of the creamed butter and sugar.
Using room temperature butter and eggs will help keep your batter emulsified.
That’s a enough Kitchen Science for today… drop any questions in the comments… let’s get on to backing one of my favorite cakes.
If you’ve never had this cake before, prepare for a treat… if you have, I can say this will be an upgrade as it’s the best recipe I’ve ever made.
Tres Leches
Translated “3 Milks”, Tres Leches is a sponge cake commonly served in Latin America; Mexico 🇲🇽 and Nicaragua 🇳🇮 specifically.
Traditionally the cake is soaked in a mixture of 3 milks: condensed milk, evaporated milk and cream. Then left to chill overnight.
The sponge soaks up all the dairy goodness giving an extremely tender and moist crumb that slightly oozes sweet milk. Topped with whipped cream, coconut and/or fresh fruits
In my opinion it’s hard to beat this on a hot summer day.
Where can this dessert go wrong?
In a word: sugar.
Most versions are cloyingly sweet 😩😩
The sugar in the sponge, with the condensed milk and evaporated milk can really go over board. And most do.
This cake should be about balance
With the recipe below I’m going to show you how to make a perfectly light, enriched sponge… with the perfect proportions of the 3 milks (cream isn’t one of them here! 😉).
And give you some recommended garnishes to take this cake over the top. 🙌
“On your mark… get set… bake!”
IYKYK 👀
