- Hey bakers.
John Kanell from Preppy Kitchen here.
Today we're making one of
my most requested recipes.
I finally have it all done for you.
It's a tres leches cake.
Light as air, fluffy cake,
completely saturated
with those tres leches
and then topped with a Chantilly cream.
Let's get started.
First off we're gonna sift
all of our dry ingredients
directly into the bowl of our stand mixer.
Starting off with three
and two-thirds cups
of all-purpose flour, or 450 grams.
Next we have two and a quarter
cups of sugar, or 480 grams.
(chuckles) Really generous
with the pours here.
Two teaspoons of baking powder, one, two,
and two teaspoons of salt.
This is a big cake.
When I was recipe testing this,
I made it a giant sheet cake
so it could be really nice and thick
with all of that tres
leches soaked in there.
It's gonna be so delicious.
Now, carefully sift this out.
It's a lot.
Let me give my scale a break.
Okay.
Avoided some giant lumps of sugar.
That's nice (chuckles).
We're gonna give this a quick whisk,
and now set this aside in our stand mixer.
Ready to go.
For the wet ingredients,
I have one third of a cup of sour cream.
That's 80 milliliters, if
you're counting it out that way.
If you don't have sour
cream, plain yogurt is fine.
You could even sub in butter milk instead.
This cake is pretty forgiving.
One and a half cups of whole
milk, carefully in there.
Clean that up.
One tablespoon of a nice vanilla extract.
Smells so good.
This is Mexican vanilla,
which is actually different
from the Tahitian vanilla
and the other varieties.
Each one is a little bit different,
and this is a Nielsen-Massey.
And one of the best gifts I
ever got, relating to vanilla
(chuckles) was a little
pack of every different kind
of vanilla from this brand,
and you could just taste
the difference and smell them.
It was really interesting.
Each one of them is nice.
Now we're gonna have
eight egg whites in here.
This cake is gonna be a nice,
beautiful, light colored cake,
even though I added that dark vanilla
in there so we're using egg whites,
and do not use fake
vanilla or clear vanilla.
That's actually vanillin which
is an artificial extract.
Just go for the real stuff,
and if you're really bothered
by the darker color,
skip it and it'll be more
of a traditional tres leches cake.
Also, you could add in a
little bit of almond extra
instead of the vanilla if you're worried
about that light color.
That was for another recipe,
we're actually gonna make
that later today but I
had to do a bit of prep.
We're gonna be making edible cookie dough.
Delicious.
So, back to this.
And eight eggs, so many
but I tell you it's a giant cake.
These yolks are perfect for
making pastry cream for.
You can click up here for that.
Just whip a batch up.
You can put it in the
fridge for a couple days,
and it is amazing in tarts and eclairs.
Directly over here, delicious.
Keep these.
All right, give this a quick whisk.
You can even do this directly
into a blender by the way and blend it up.
It's very satisfying.
As I did yesterday.
(milk sloshing)
That's fine.
Now we're going to deal with
our dry ingredients again.
So, for this recipe,
we're using 17 tablespoons
of unsalted butter, at room temperature.
We're gonna add it into our flour,
like a tablespoon dollop at a time,
but you don't have to wait.
You can just add them
in, in a bunch of groups.
And what's gonna happen is
this flour will be coated
with all the fat from the
butter and it will inhibit
the gluten formation and give
you a wonderful, nice crumb.
Very moist, and it's gonna moisturize
your little fingers too.
This is called the "Reverse-Crumb
Method" and I love it.
It's so easy to do, too.
Okay, let's give this a start.
(beep)
(chuckles) On low.
Add the rest of the butter
in, and you're gonna find
that it forms like this almost
pastry dough like crumble
of just little pieces.
It's needs to go for a bit longer, though.
Also, scrape the bowl
down a bit to make sure
that nothing is getting
hidden at the bottom.
(mixer hums)
Mm it smells good already.
I eat pastry dough raw all the time.
I don't mind it.
All right, that looks good to me.
What we're gonna do now
is finish our batter off
by pouring in the wet mixture.
Half first.
Scrape the bowl down.
Add the second half.
Whew!
Okay.
On low.
Add half in, let it mix up.
Check the bowl.
Make sure nothing bad is happening.
Okay, and add the rest of it.
(mixer hums)
Okay, let's see.
Beautiful, nice, smooth dough.
I'm gonna finish it off
just by hand to make sure
there are no lumps hanging
out around here or there.
That's ready to pour
into our prepared pan.
I'm using a nine by 13 baking pan.
I will be lining this with
parchment paper though.
It makes a big difference.
It's so much easier to get out
and you have a little
bit less caramelization.
Although, I'm not gonna lie,
we are trimming this cake.
I want no crusts on it.
Ultimate indulgence.
To get a nice fit for my parchment paper,
I'm just gonna cut at the corners.
One, two,
three, and four.
Give it a preliminary fold.
This is optional but I really
find it comes in handy.
Okay, now flip the pan over.
Add that back in there and
you'll see what happens.
You can just fold the corners
and it's all nice and neat.
(paper crinkles)
All my Virgo feelings are coming up nice.
Now pour your batter in.
This batter smells so good
I can't even tell you.
Using a nice vanilla
makes a huge difference.
Although I know it's
very expensive right now.
Now give it a shake.
We're gonna bake this at
350 Fahrenheit, 177 Celsius,
for about, I think, 40 minutes.
Just check on it.
Let a skewer come out clean,
and it's gonna be ready to go.
Into the oven!
What takes a tres leches
cake to the next level,
is of course the tres leches.
We're gonna use three quarters
of a cup of whole milk.
This is up to you.
You can add a little bit
more or a little bit less,
if you want it to be sweeter or milkier.
A 12 fluid ounce can of evaporated milk
and 14 ounces of this magical,
sweetened, condensed milk.
This is what I have in my coffee
when I'm feeling extra indulgent.
Like I don't care if the pants fit,
I wanna be happy.
Not how I'm feeling this week (chuckles),
but I miss it.
It's so good.
I have it with my espresso,
and then add some of this
in and a little bit of milk,
and it's like a Vietnamese
coffee, but taken down a notch.
Now let's give it a
whisk and set it aside.
But you really do wanna whisk it together
otherwise the sweetened, condensed milk
will just kind of lay on the bottom.
It's very thick.
This stuff tastes like heaven,
and if you want you can add
vanilla to this as well,
but it's totally up to you.
(milk sloshing)
I'm gonna leave it out because
I feel like this is the star.
It's kind of like a Fior di Latte Gelato.
Where you're just tasting the milk.
Like if the milk is extra good,
you can taste it coming through.
I ate so much gelato in
Rome and I miss it so much!
Take me back.
Gonna use my extra-nice serrated knife,
and deal with this cake.
Normally, you know, I use cake strips.
I don't have to do any cutting,
but today things are gonna
be a little different.
So I'm gonna invert this onto a wire rack.
It's already cool.
(pan clanks on counter)
Clank.
So, here, you don't have to trim it.
You can leave it just like this,
but I think the cake is so beautiful
when you can see it with
just the crumb showing.
Like it's gorgeous, and very slippery.
I'm not gonna make the same mistake
I made with my vanilla cake.
Just, just baked.
It's like a Goldilocks situation.
(splat)
(chuckling) That was not cool.
Take that away.
Just cut the edges off,
if you want to.
I also feel like, visually,
a tres leches cake
is supposed to be like very milky white
that's why I didn't use the egg yolks.
I wanted to be true to the materials,
i.e. the different milks.
And now, do you wanna be crazy?
I do.
You don't have to but this'll be
extra extra absorbent if
you take this top off.
Because of the paper we used,
most of that caramelization
is actually gone on the paper
but we can do a little bit more
and have a nice beautiful cake.
Now we have all of our
beautiful cake exposed.
So pillowy soft.
That's gonna be used for snacking.
I'm not throwing it away.
Here's where things get different.
I'm gonna place this in a large dish.
Very, very carefully.
(dish and rack clank together)
There we go (chuckles).
So if you didn't wanna cut the crust off
that's totally fine.
You can just pierce it
with a fork over and over
and over again, and you can still do that
even after you cut the crust off
to make more room for the tres leches.
Otherwise, you just have
to pour really slowly
so the cake absorbs it.
All right, let's get started.
This is the good part.
Just go slow.
The cake is gonna be like a sponge,
but it's not as absorbent as you want
so you have to give it some time.
Don't rush it.
This is the important part.
Some will leak over onto the sides.
Don't worry about that.
It'll still get absorbed
through the bottom.
Yeah (chuckles) it is moist!
It's like sopping wet.
Just how I like it.
This is my husband's nightmare.
He hates it.
He like, "This is disgusting!"
He likes fluffy, supermarket cakes.
For the frosting, we're adding
in three cups of heavy cream.
One, two, three, whoa
that's a lot (chuckles).
And then half a cup of
confectioners' sugar.
The confectioners' sugar
has some cornstarch in it,
which'll help thicken
the whipped cream up.
I'm adding in like a little
bit less than half a cup,
and I can add a bit more if I want to.
(mixer hums)
Mix it up until you get those
nice soft, beautiful peaks.
(mixer hums)
We're almost there.
Let's take a look.
You don't want to over beat whipped cream.
(smacking lips)
That's nice.
I'm gonna add in the rest so
I get to my almost half cup
and now a splash of vanilla.
You can leave it up to
kinda however much you want.
Continue mixing it up.
We're almost there.
(mixer hums)
Okay, that looks good.
Yeah.
Anymore and it would be too
far, but this is just right.
You might know this about me,
but I'm disgusting and
will eat all of this.
I'm adding in an 8.8 ounce,
or 250 gram container
of room temperature mascarpone cheese.
I'm gonna actually put it
into a little bowl first
and just give it a quick mash
to make sure it's all pliable.
Some of it gets a little
bit, I don't wanna say lumpy,
but has a thicker texture in parts.
So now I'm gonna fold
the mascarpone cheese
into my whipped cream.
This is an optional step.
You don't have to do it,
but I love how it thickens
the whip cream up and
just adds a little bit,
like the tiniest bit of tang to it.
So fold that in by hand.
Okay, this is just gonna go on top.
I'm gonna use a scoop,
but you can just plop
it on however you want.
Now you can smooth it all out.
Using an ice cream scoop
is kind of just fun,
but it also helps you
control kind of the thickness
of the icing and the placement.
And once you're ready,
you can give like a final little smooth.
Look at all that whipped cream.
It's so amazing.
So, let's cut a piece, and
then carefully take it out.
The first one is, of
course, the most difficult
but since we've switched
to a bigger container it's much easier.
Transfer it over.
This'll be delicious
but I gotta tell you it
looks a little plain.
So I'm gonna garnish it
with a tiny strawberry,
and then fan the strawberry pieces out.
Place them on top along
with a sprig of mint.
There you go.
All right, I think that looks darling,
and it is time for a taste.
Oh my gosh, it's so light
and creamy, and the cake
is fall-apart tender thanks
to all the tres leches.
Mm that is so good.
A perfect balance of sweetness.
It is an amazing cake.
This has actually been
one of my most requested cake recipes.
So many people have been
asking for tres leches
but I wanted to get it perfect for you
and I hope you get to make this recipe.
If you like this video,
check out my "How to Make Vanilla Cake".
It is the perfect vanilla
cake and it is so easy too.
You will fall in love with that recipe.
Thanks so much for watching.
If you like my videos,
don't forget to hit that
"Like" button and subscribe.
See you soon.
