This Chocolate Tres Leches Cake Is Our Only Weekend Plan

Simple Cake by Odette Williams is as carefree as a cookbook gets: 10 cakes, 15 toppings, mix and match the recipes however the heck you want. This means 150 possibilities for us readers. And a lot of work for the author.

“In the year that I wrote Simple Cake, I lost track of how many cakes I baked,” she told me. “It was a lot more than 150.”

Her suggested flavor combos include a hazelnut cake with Nutella whipped cream (want), lemon yogurt cake with a berry crumble (want), and olive oil cake with boozy crème anglaise (want). But the one that stood out to me the most took two of my favorite cakes and turned them into one: Chocolate Tres Leches.

It starts with Williams’s go-to chocolate cake, which she describes as “ridiculously moist” and comparable to “Betty Crocker in terms of ease.” She adapted the bowl-and-whisk recipe from a friend, who taught her that “the magic lies in the marriage of baking soda, boiling water, and oil.” Those ingredients give the cake its can’t-be-beat texture—and make it the ideal candidate for a tres leches soak.

While tres leches traditionally starts with a plain or vanilla-flavored sponge cake, “it can work with all sorts of cake flavor profiles,” according to Williams. “Even ones you least expect.” All you need is “a cake that has enough structure and air for the liquid to penetrate and soak the cake evenly.”

As its name gives away, the liquid here is actually three liquids: evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, and whole milk (or, even better, heavy cream). With the cake still in its pan, you use a skewer or chopstick to poke it a bunch of times, spoon the milk mixture on top, then refrigerate overnight.

This soak “transforms a cake into a puddinglike dessert,” Williams writes in Simple Cake. And you already love chocolate pudding, do you not? For bonus points, reserve some of the sweetened condensed milk and put it toward the whipped cream, for swooshing and swirling on top.

As Williams put it, “It’s one of those great desserts that can be made ahead, feed many, and not take up too much of your time.”

And as if that weren’t enough, its flavor alone had our staff smitten. Executive Editor Joanna Sciarrino said it “tastes like what the brown chocolate scented marker smelled like.” Which, by the way, is a compliment (“That was my favorite scented marker”). Meanwhile, Senior Editor Eric Kim stumbled into the test kitchen to find breakfast, “but decided to have cake instead,” because it’s just that good. We should all be so smart.

Have you ever made tres leches before? Tell us more about it in the comments!