Take A Classic Tres Leches Cake Up A Notch With Some Chocolate Milk

Cake is a dessert that's enjoyed in tons of different ways around the world, whether that's as a classic Victoria sponge for afternoon tea in Great Britain or a decadent Black Forest Cake from Germany. While these may be popular European cakes, in Latin America, the cake to eat is the moist and light tres leches cake.

Tres leches means 'three milks' in Spanish, and the cake contains three different kinds of milk — regular cow's milk, evaporated milk, and sweetened condensed milk. Now, while these are the traditional milk in this recipe, instead of going with the status quo, why not try mixing things up and adding chocolate milk to your recipe instead? This chocolate twist is a great way to mix things up and try a different spin on a classic dessert.

Here's how to go about substituting in chocolate milk next time you make a tres leches cake. Plus, here's a brief history of where this cake even came from in the first place.

If you're going to add chocolate milk to a tres leches cake, the way to go about it isn't to just switch out the regular milk and call it a day (although you could technically do that). You'll want to make a couple of other adjustments to the recipe as well.

For one thing, instead of using a yellow cake base, you're going to want to switch to a chocolate cake base instead. This adjustment will help play up the chocolate milk, making for a delicious twist on your classic tres leches recipe. Another adjustment to this recipe is that when you go to soak your tres leches cake in milk mixture, you'll want to add a few tablespoons of cocoa powder to the milk mix. The result is that when you pour the milk over the cake base, you don't just get vanilla flavors; instead, you build on the chocolate flavor of the base.

Finally, once you're ready to serve the cake, instead of topping it with regular whipped cream, try making a chocolate whipped cream by adding cocoa powder and confectioner's sugar to your heavy whipping cream. Once again, this helps play up the chocolate flavor of your tres leches cake, making for a unique twist on this dessert.

Whether it's chocolate or regular tres leches cake you're making, this dessert has its roots many years ago. You see, tres leches cake, despite its Spanish name, may actually have been inspired by sherry-soaked spongecakes in Great Britain hundreds of years ago. Then, when colonists made their way to the Central American nation of Nicaragua, they brought this idea of soaking cakes in liquid with them, and historians believe it's from there that the idea of tres leches was born.

Still, while that may be where tres leches cake originated, it certainly wasn't where it became popular. Years later, in the early 1900s, Nestle's factories in Mexico began printing a recipe for tres leches cake on their evaporated and condensed milk product packaging. The result is that the idea of tres leches cake took off. Today, tres leches cake is popular in many different Latin American countries, not just Mexico and Nicaragua. Plus, variations such as our chocolate tres leches cake have cropped up for people to try. So, whether it's regular or chocolate tres leches cake you try, this is a delicious dessert for milk lovers to take a bite of.