Celebrating the Battle of Puebla with Tres Leches Cake!

Each year on May 5th, we have a Cinco de Mayo potluck lunch at work.  This year I decided to make something from the cookbook that counted as "Mexican enough".  I posed the question to one of our Power Team members and she decided I should make Janet's Tres Leches Cake (p. 116).  It didn't quite occur to me until I was making the cake that it contains a fair amount of rum.  I always assume that rum in any recipe mostly bakes or cooks out... but something to know about this cake is that the rum is blended into the sauce, which is added to the cake after baking and before storing cold.

I guess you could say it is fairly alcoholic, as cakes go.

The cake itself went together quite easily, with its base of yellow cake mix with pudding.  The smell of rum was quite heady as it was blended into condensed milk and evaporated milk, and then pored over the hot cake perforated with many fork holes. The topping is whipped cream, chopped macadamia nuts, and toasted coconut.  I reserved the topping for just prior to the Cinco De Mayo festivities because I was concerned the whipped cream would get runny.  Now, if you've ever had a Tres Leches Cake, you will know that that was ridiculous.  The cake itself is so soggy one would never notice if the topping were a little runny.

The hardest part of this recipe, for me, was the toasted coconut.  My friend Google let me know that I could toast the coconut on a cookie sheet in my oven, and warned me that I should check it often and make sure I didn't burn it.  I promptly burned by first batch.  For my second, I watched the oven like a hawk and it turned out ok (perhaps a little more done than I intended, but good enough).

Everyone loved the cake, except for my coworker who can't handle soggy bread.  This was absolutely one of the worst things she has ever had the misfortune to witness.  As I was leaving the party I thought I had better try a bite for blog purposes and was shocked by how rum-filled it was.  I'm not saying my coworkers like to drink but...no wonder everyone loved it!