Four milks are better than three

Several years ago I saw an episode of Good Eats on the Food Network in which host Alton Brown makes Tres Leches cake; literally, three milks cake. You basically make a white cake and allow a mixture of whole, evaporated, and condensed cow juice absorb into it. The promise of a completely fat- and sugar-soaked bite of cake burned itself into the desire portion of my brain. But I lived with a lactose-intolerant person (read: sissy) for many years and never got around to making the cake myself.

Then, in Peru, in January, at a bakery, I finally tried it. Imagine the heaviest, sweetest cake possible, which is simultaneously cool and refreshing. Yeah, food love. I ate it everyday I had access to said bakery.

So upon my return to Canada, I was determined to make some myself. I looked up a recipe on Allrecipes.com. I collected the ingredients and started to bake yesterday. And it seemed like none of this was ever going to work.

I mean, look at the recipe: five eggs is too many eggs. But I added the eggs and forged ahead. Then I baked the cake and it was a big, flat, sugary paperweight. The pan I used wasn't even level. Then I mixed up the milk. It had to be too much milk - how could that much milk fit into a doorstop cake? I added the milk and my suspicions were confirmed; it was just a cake pan of milk. I couldn't even see the cake. But I put it in the fridge and waited a few hours. Miraculously, the milk was absorbed by the cake. All of it.

Then I set to work on the whipped cream for the top. To be fair, this is the fourth milk in a three milk cake. Ignore that fact, the whipped cream is necessary. But I was like, a cup of sugar is too much. And why doesn't the recipe call for powdered sugar? But I followed the directions, assuming that I would soon be adding more milky moisture to a dessert that was destined for the bushes outside the cabin.

Soon after adding the topping I sliced myself a big piece in a moment of blind faith. If you could chill and slice a piece of God's brain it wouldn't taste as good as this cake. Seriously.

Moral of the story: four milks are better than three.