Recipe: Tres Leches Cake

Tres Leches literally means three milks in Spanish, because three kinds of milks were used - evaporated milk , condensed milk and the regular whole milk. We Hong Kongers are more familiar with evaporated milk (花奶/淡奶) and condensed milk (煉奶) for their wide use in local street foods and drinks such as milk tea and toasts, but they are almost as common as a cooking ingredient in many Latin American dishes. So for those from overseas, they should be readily available in supermarkets stocking Asian or Latin American grocery items - try find them in those specialty spots.

This is an adoption of a recipe from Williams-Sonoma website (http://blog.williams-sonoma.com/tres-leches-mini-cakes/) and became part of the dessert I made. For the recipe for the whole thing, please refer to this post published at the same time.

Ingredients (makes 12 mini-cakes)

1 can sweetened condensed milk (370g)
1 small can evaporated milk (170g)
1 cup whipping cream
3 tablespoon of dark rum (can substitute with light rum or omit altogether)
1 cup of all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt
3 large eggs
1/2 cup whole milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Melted butter (for greasing the pan)

Steps

1. Pre-heat convectional oven to 180C. Mix the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder and salt) together in a large bowl. Whisk in eggs, milk and vanilla extract completely until they formed a smooth batter without any lumps.
2. Lightly grease the muffin pan with melted butter. Pour batter (to around 2/3 high) in the pan and then bake for about 20 minutes, until the cake turned slightly golden and toothpick came out clean when put to the middle of the cake.
3. While the cakes are baking in the oven, prepare a deep dish, pour evaporated milk, condensed milk, whipping cream and rum into it and mixed all ingredients well.
4. After the cakes came out of the oven, carefully remove the cakes from the pan and transfer into a wire rack. Poke a few holes in each of the cake, and dip the cake into the deep dish with the milk mixture. It's okay the cakes didn't completely submerge but do spoon the milk on top of the cake generously so they can be soaked the liquid completely.
5. Leave the cake in the milk mixture for one hour, then transfer the cake into an airtight container and let chilled for at least 4 hours (and up to 3 days as I was told, well for mine it hardly lasted 1 day before they were all consumed) Save the milk mixture in the refrigerator at the same time too - can soak the cake a little more before serving or use it as the additional sauce.