Wednesday, Nov. 25 2009 @ 1:00PM
From the moment we first tried it, tres leches has monopolized a decent-size spot in our hearts previously reserved for chocolate. This originally Nicaraguan dessert is a vanilla sponge cake full of tiny, tasty air bubbles and topped with an incredible combination of three milks: evaporated, sweetened condensed, and whole milk or cream. The distinct texture, as holey and odd as it is, explains why the cake never gets soggy, despite being soaked in rich liquids.
As a dessert, tres leches provides just the right amounts of sweetness and splendor. But it's so loaded with calcium that we often like to consider it breakfast fare (don't judge!). The cake is moist without mush, light without air, an angel without wings. Calorie-wise, it's not health food by any twist of the lens, but it sure is a mighty fine way to finish a meal.
In a quest to find the best tres leches in town, we recently hosted a small blind tasting featuring the perennial city favorites. Here's what we learned.
5) Escalante's
Escalante's serves up a beautiful-looking tres leches that's topped with a generous beat of shaved chocolate. While the gesture looks nice and all, we found that the chocolate's bittersweetness overpowers the inherent simplicity of the vanilla cake. (Should we tell them that vanilla and chocolate only work together in Neapolitan ice cream and Dairy Queen dip cones?) Even after we scraped the shavings off, however, this lackluster cake failed to impress. And at $7, Escalante's version of tres leches costs double the others, so we see no reason to place this piece anywhere but last.
4) 100% Taquito
When you place your Tres Leches order at 100% Taquito, the chica behind the counter asks a simple question: Would you like caramel on top? And the answer -- obviously -- is yes. Laden with magically gigantor air pockets, the cake here is certainly the spongiest of the lot. But while we expected great things at the outset, the milk mixture is overly thin and doesn't soak into the cake quite right, leaving you with a filthy, runny mess. The caramel steps up the flavor punch, but it can't hide a downtrodden consistency that's moist on the bottom and dry on top.