Pastel de Tres Leches (Three Milks Cake)

Prepared 5-03-09:

This cake always looked intimidating to me--I thought it was difficult to make. But since I'm up for a challenge and was on a roll with desserts, I decided to give it a try.

I had no previous recipe, so what I did first was go to my trusty cooksillustrated.com and did a search. No luck with that. I then went to the Food Network website and found one provided by a Mexican hotel cook. I thought it would be authentic. But it came out horrible. There were lime zests visible and worst of all the cake was kind of hard. Not even close to a sponge cake. I threw it away. Later I would find out why it came out that way...

Second try was the first recipe I found when I did a Google search of "Pastel de Tresh Leches". It was from about.com I tried the recipe and again it came kind of hard and more importantly, flat and thin. Not good, but I still served it after the pozole. It wasn't horrible, but not authentic at all. My poor family had to eat it.

I became obsessed with getting it right and the next day I tried again. I happened to find a video on biensimple.com and it showed how the cake batter had to look like--it wasn't even close to what mine looked before. Turns out I didn't beat it for long enough! Duh. I followed the new recipe but used rum in the milk mixture like the previous recipe indicated because I like the nice flavor it gave. Although I finally got a good sponge consistency this time, I chose the wrong cake pan size (the recipe didn't specify it) and so the batter was coming out of the small square pan and was no good.

The fourth try was successful by using a 8x11 inch pan. This is how it looked at that point:

From now on I will use a 9x13 in. pan instead because I think that would be the ideal size. (There's more room at the top of the cake.)

I thought it tasted delicious. I had not had this cake many times in the past, but my sister Jenny said it was better than the ones she tasted before. That's good enough for me!