Quatro Leches Cake

As you've seen in the past, I'm an admirer of the New York Times' coverage of food. They give me ideas about what to cook for Thanksgiving, they elucidate the chemical properties of butter and provide me with the best brownie recipe I've ever made (make it the only, since there's no need to improve upon perfection), thereby giving me the tools to create some of the best cookies ever.

All that to say a couple of weeks ago they wrote about the delights of cooking with condensed milk. And I knew it was time. Time to bake my first Tres Leches Cake. If you haven't had this, it's a rich and moist sponge cake of South America provenance with, you guessed it, a lot of milk and cream. This is not for the lactose-fearful.

I went with Alton Brown's recipe. The concept is simple - make a sponge cake, soak with milk for a few hours, ice with whipped cream

Ingredients:

Cake:

• Vegetable oil
• 6 3/4 ounces cake flour, plus extra for pan
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 4 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature
• 8 ounces sugar
• 5 whole eggs
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Look at all the holes! All the better to soak up oodles of sweetened milk, evaporated milk, milk milk, cream, what have you. Milk of all stripes.

Glaze:

• 1 (12-ounce) can evaporated milk
• 1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
• 1 cup half-and-half

As it turns out, with milk and cream in the fridge, I didn't want to buy a huge half-and-half just for this. What's the use of cream that doesn't whip into a glorious froth? So I dub this cake Quatro Leches, because I soaked it in the two canned milks, and milk and heavy whipping cream.

Whipped cream topping:

• 2 cups heavy cream
• 8 ounces sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Do NOT make this with 8 ounces of sugar. I love sweet things, but if they are cloyingly sweet, it overpowers the flavors of any other things, like the cake, the lushness of the cream. I added barely 2 oz of sugar here, and it was still a little too sweet for my taste. I think next time I will top the cake with unsweetened whipped cream, because sweet cake soaked in sweetened milk is sweet enough for me.