Tres Leches Cake: Shoutout to Yale Dining

If you happen to be an ~alumni~ colleague reading this, then you're probably mildly tired of all the post-commencement photo dumps and sentimental posts. Well, at least I am. Commencement is certainly an exciting time, but after a week of senior activities PLUS 3 days worth of ceremonies and events, it gets pretty exhausting.

For my first post in post-college life, I decided to keep up with the sentimental spirit floating around social media and make tres leches, a Yale dining classic. We students do love to complain about college dining, but every once in a while, there's a few things they get right. One of which includes tres leches, a sponge cake soaked in a mixture of three milks--condensed milk, sweetened evaporated milk, and heavy cream. Now, pan or tray desserts, like brownie fudge or cobbler, in the dining hall creep me out for some reason. Something about it being produced in such a large pan quantity I think. Unfortunately, tres leches was one of these desserts, so it wasn't until junior year that I tried this deliciously moist, creamy, and milky cake. It seemed only fitting to tie off the end of my college career by attempting to recreate something I associate with friendly conversations and meals.

Unfortunately, my baking skills are still not quite up to par. Its a bit embarrassing to think that the dining hall, with its huge bulk quantity cooking and baking, can make something of a superior quality than I can in my tiny kitchen with all the time in the world. While my brother, mother, and father all seemed to enjoy the cake to a certain degree, my sister who has eaten dining hall tres leches could only laugh at my meager attempts. Rather than a ridiculously squishy, gooey, bread-pudding like texture dessert, my tres leches was much drier and dense. Granted, I get the feeling that my sponge cake was not right given its lack of rise. Which was possibly because of over beaten egg whites, too much flour, or too much folding--all of which I have had issues with in the past. I was hoping that the sweet milk mixture would soak the cake enough that these wouldn't be issues, but I tried taste testing the cake after only half a day of soaking rather than overnight as most recipes seem to suggest. The lesson here is that you really should plan your baking more in advance if you're trying to make a 9am EST deadline for a blog post the next day. 

The recipe I used was from All Recipes, but I found that there were a few things that were off. While instructions called to bake for 40-50 minutes, it only took 20-30 mins to finish baking mine. Other weird things I mentioned earlier. I used about a pint of heavy cream to make the whipping cream topping, but that was definitely way too much if you only wanted to cover the cake.

While the dining halls version of tres leches didn't have whipped cream topping or fruit on top like many of the recipes I found online, one can never go wrong with some extra homemade whipped cream and raspberries right? I'm hoping that if I try the cake tomorrow morning, the cake will have had more time to soak so that it'll be more moist. Regardless, I think that tres leches will have to eventually become a perfected recipe in my "repertoire" for any future days of college nostalgia.