Coconut milk is one of my favorite ingredients for both sweet and savory dishes—I even have a cornbread recipe on my list that uses coconut milk!
I’ve never made tres leches cakes before, but swapping condensed milk for coconut milk intrigued me. The recipe was straightforward and the timing of mixing the batter was spot on.
Since I only made half of the recipe, I ended up using a 1/4 sheet pan, which may have made the cake a little thinner. It cooked faster and the cake browned around the edges and peeled off the edge within 30 minutes.
A little more guidance on total soaking time would have been helpful. I went slow, but as the recipe says, there seemed to be too much liquid so I ended up with a little squirt.
I kept the cooled cake in the fridge for 4 hours before making the whipped cream frosting. Although the cake appeared to be drowning, the finished cake wasn’t as soggy as I expected, so I certainly could have used more of the liquid.
My favorite flavors of the cake were the toasted coconut and lime zest in the whipped cream. Tres Leches cake is always very sweet, blame the sweetened condensed milk, but I would have liked a little less sugar and added lime notes in the cake.
I will definitely come back to this recipe. It’s an easy-to-prepare dessert that’s sure to please the crowd at a dinner party, and a major benefit: you can prepare it ahead of time and it only gets better the more soaking time you give.