Tres Leches Cake – vanilla sponge cake with a cinnamon milk soak, whipped cream and fresh strawberries.

Tres Leches Cake

With Cinco de Mayo just two days away, there’s no better time than the present to make a Tres Leches Cake. This flavor has been requested over and over during the past few years and I’m so excited that I finally got around to making my own version.

I’ve always seen Tres Leches Cake in a 13″x9″ pan, but knew that when I did mine, I wanted to turn it into a layered cake. I worried about doing that, though, because a Tres Leches Cake, soaked in a milk mixture, always seemed fragile to me.

After doing some research, I learned that most Tres Leches cakes are made kind of like a meringue with a lot of whipped egg whites to give it a fluffy, sponge-like consistency. Several recipes I looked at also had equal parts sugar and flour. I knew that if I wanted to make a more stable cake for layering, I’d need to add a bit more flour than sugar to my recipe.

I reviewed my Classic Vanilla Cake recipe and compared it to the Tres Leches recipes I had been researching. It wasn’t too far off from the actual ingredients other recipes used, I just needed to adjust my amounts a bit.

I ended up using more flour in my recipe than other Tres Leches recipes so it would for sure be stable enough to be a layered cake once the soak was added.

The Soak

The soak for this cake is made up of heavy cream, evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk and cinnamon. The cinnamon gives it a bit of a horchata flavor and I think you’ll love it!

Just make sure to poke holes into your cake after it’s cooled, so when you pour the soak on the cake, it really absorbs into the layers.

The Whipped Cream

The whipped cream filling makes enough for the filling and to add a dollop on top of each slice of cake. To simplify the stabilization process, I used E-Z Gel from Gygi. If you can’t find E-Z Gel, you can also use gelatin to stabilize the whipped cream like I do in my Strawberry Shortcake Cake.