05 Mar Cereal Milk Tres Leches Cake

This nostalgia-spiked tres leches cake is responsible for my rapid transformation from a tres leches cake? soooo, soggy cake? thanks but no thanks person, to a nom nom nom sorry I can’t hear you over the sound of my own moans because this cake is so-fuh-king good kind of person. For any of you fellow Christina Tossi fans out there, it’s made infinitely delicious by the addition of Momofuku-inspired Cinnmon Toast Crunch cereal milk, but we’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s chat tres leches cake.

Traditionally, tres leches cake — or pastel tres leches, if we’re being not-so-white-girl (am I allowed to say that?) – is a light, sturdy, butterless (as much as it pains me, this is very important – we’ll get to the deets later) sponge cake that, in it’s simplest form, is soaked in a combination of sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk and cream, or three milks, and thus, tres leches.

Its roots are quite obviously grounded in Latin American culture, though which specific one remains a mystery. It is widely debated where the tres leches cake first originated – Mexico? Cuba? Nicaragua? Who’s the daddy? All claim it as their own, and since I’m just the baker-person, it’s not a dispute I’m willing to weigh in on. <— Is this the Jerry Springer episode of the pastry world?

What I do know, is that growing up in Texas I had many many run-ins with this popular cake as a kid. And never once did I enjoy it. Womp. It could have been my undeveloped palate, or maybe I was never exposed to a well-prepared version, but I always found it to be akin to an unexciting, plain white cake…only…soggier.

It wasn’t until many, many moons later (so like, two months ago) that my interest in this notoriously mushy cake was renewed. While perusing the aisles of my local Fiesta Mart – one of my all-time favorite activities, they have the most affordable and well stocked international foods selection ever — I noticed a stall near the entrance of the store where a woman stood, dressed head to toe in all-white baker’s garb, dishing out tres leches cake by the fat, square slice, piling on scoops of chopped cherries, pineapple slices and shredded coconut at her customers’ command. I was instantly transported to the bakery and the local grocer that handed out free chewy chocolate cookies when I was a kid (perhaps the reason I am conditioned to forever love trips to the grocery store), only this was better. 

And just like that, tres leches was back on the good list. I was intrigued. I had to make a version of my own.

There was still one problem to solve — the issue of soggy cake. Millions of tres leches loving people couldn’t be wrong, could they? They couldn’t all be making such a fuss over wet, mushy cake, right? I was determined not to let my childhood memory reign victorious. There had to be a key to finding that addicting balance between moist and mushy, and I was determined to unlock it.

And the answer (as is always the answer) was butter.

Only this time, the answer was to leave it out. You see, the added fat and therefore moisture that butter lends to sponge cake can be absolutely divine…if you’re just eating sponge cake. But when you add butter to a tres leches cake, it causes the cake to have too much moisture and too little structure, resulting in a softer version of tres leches that in my opinion feels, well, waterlogged (or I suppose milk-logged, in this case). Many of the recipes you’ll find online do include butter —  it’s omission is not a hard-and-fast rule — but I found that by eliminating it, my cake had a perfectly airy texture that held its shape for several days. No mush, no sog, only dreamy, lightly soaked, spongey cake.

With all this chit chat about soggy cake, I should note that there is a place for sogginess in this recipe and that’s in the cereal milk. Yes, cereal milk. That dreamy liquid that you slurped from the bottom of your breakfast bowl as a kid. Recently, it’s made a comeback — widely popularized among adults by Momofuku Milk Bar’s Christina Tossi. And in my opinion, she’s the tits. What I’d give to just crawl up inside her brain for a day!

While Christina’s recipe for traditional cereal milk calls for whole milk and corn flakes, I upped the ante and soaked this tres leches cake in a kicked-up version where we take all tres of the leches, add the yielder-of-the-best-cereal-milk-in-the-history-of-cereal-milk, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and let all them sit around for a while to get nice and smushy with one another. Then, if you’ve resisted the urge to dive in with your largest spoon and a bib, everything goes for a quick spin in the blender, a trip through a mesh sieve and voila, you’ve got the cereal milk of your childhood dreams. The stuff of Saturday mornings and afterschool snacks, only better because this time we’ve added sweetened condensed milk (what I imagine is what unicorn tears taste like) and we get to pour it over cake.

Drooling yet?

Good! Vamos a hornear un pastel tres leches! <– Thank you 10th grade Spanish!

And if you haven’t picked up on it yet – I’ve got a thing for desserts featuring the beloved, oh-so-sugary cereals of my childhood. For more of the madness check out this Fruity Pebbles Funfetti Cake from my last birthday celebration and this recipe for Party-In-Your-Mouth Rice Krispie Treats from the extremely embarrassing, way way back archives.

A New Notes About This Recipe

For the cereal milk, you can use either cream or whole milk for the third milk variety. Most traditional recipes call for cream, but I used whole milk to lighten mine up a little bit and it worked perfectly.

The tres leches mixture will make more liquid than you’ll need for the cake. I used about 1 3/4 cups but you could probably use up to 2 1/2 depending on how milky you’d like your cake.

For the step where you pour the milks over the cake, make sure the cake is on a rimmed dish. Some of the milk will run off of the cake at first, but the rim will hold the extra liquid close to the cake and it will soak it all up after you let it sit for 30 minutes. 

Recipe adapted from The Pioneer Woman

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