Trece leches cake

happy 5th birthday to food is stupid

Hello, clowns!

It’s time for all of you to put on your finest party hats, because today is a very special day: It’s Food is Stupid’s 5th birthday!

Today’s edition of the newsletter has it all, from gifts in the form of a giveaway (which comes at the end of today’s piece), a weeklong discount on subscriptions, and most importantly, cake.

And what a cake it is. This is an idea I’ve been wanting to do for years now, but it never quite felt like the right time. Until today, that is, because anyone’s 5th birthday is a pretty big deal. Might as well throw a proper party to celebrate!

But before I begin, I’ll just say if you’ve been considering a subscription, today’s the day to pick one up, because I’m dropping a 20% off coupon that’s good for one week only.

I have been working on this newsletter for five years now, dropping new editions almost weekly. That’s hundreds of pieces, which I still can’t get over to this day. I write it for lots of reasons, but mainly because most of us just need to laugh and enjoy some nihilistic mayhem through all the pain that life hurls our way. The repulsive culinary shit is just a bonus.

So hey, give signing up a thought. Today’s as good a day as any, especially because you get a sick deal. It’ll unlock all the past paid stuff, which includes five years worth of archives, plus you get subscriber-only shit in the future too. (And if you’re an existing subscriber, I believe it will simply tack the deal onto your existing subscription, but let me know if you have issues.)

Now who’s ready to experience the most types of milk ever shoved into one place? And no, it’s not in my ass. For once.

Today’s celebration pastry is a play on the classic delicious Mexican tres leches cake, which is one of my favorite desserts of all time.

Tres leches cake is great because it’s sweet, simple, and comforting. It’s exactly what the name says it is: a sponge cake that’s soaked in whole milk, condensed milk, and evaporated milk.

Of course, when you call it “tres leches,” which means “three milks,” this leaves the thing wide open for troublemakers to lift the hood up and fuck around with it. Take for example, The New York Times, who infamously once published a recipe for not tres, but seis (six) leches cake.

Apparently this was now some sort of milk arms race to see just how much milk you could cram into a cake. So I thought to myself, “Dannis Ree, as the greatest food writer in all of history, how can you say ‘fuck you all’ to everyone else who has decided to mess with tres leches cake for no reason? If they’re going to put seis leches into a cake, why can’t you put, like 13 of them in there?”

Davida and I (who just celebrated our first wedding anniversary!) then embarked on a quest to buy all the interesting milk we could find, which took us across the city of Chicago to four different grocery stores.

We picked up oat milk, rice milk, buttermilk, goat milk, 2% regular milk, powdered milk, Muscle Milk, coconut milk, chocolate milk, condensed sweetened milk, black bean and black sesame soy milk, banana milk, and last but not least, camel milk. Yes, camel milk.

In terms of the cake part, well. If you have been following the newsletter for long enough, you have probably noticed that I rarely bake anything. That is because I hate baking. So rather than ruin my kitchen with a bunch of flour, I just got Pillsbury white cake mix, which is likely based off an authentic Mexican recipe for cake.

The leches in tres leches cake aren’t in the batter, but rather used as a soaking liquid for the cake after it’s been baked.

But the thing is, I wanted to experience the milks in all sorts of ways. So I decided to build five of them into the cake batter right away.

I started by whisking some powdered milk into the dry cake mix.

The cake mix requires a cup of water to hydrate the batter, so I replaced the water with a quarter cup of buttermilk, regular milk, oat milk, and rice milk mixed together to create one total cup of liquid, spilling a bunch of it on our kitchen island as I was doing it.

I stirred the four-milk mixture into the dry ingredients with three whole eggs and a half cup of vegetable oil, as instructed on the box.

Then I started over from scratch, replaced every single ingredient with ground beef, wondered why my cake didn’t turn out properly, and left an angry review on Pillsbury’s website demanding to know why my white cake was made entirely out of meat.

Next, I baked the cake as instructed, which seemed to take a weirdly long time.

Did you guys know that a 9x13 inch pan of cake mix takes 34 to 38 minutes to bake?! That seems longer than I expected a cake to bake, but I trust the little Pillsbury Doughboy because he wears a chef’s hat. Do you think he can take Betty Crocker in a bareknuckle boxing match? Is it cheating if he doesn’t seem to have knuckles?

As the cake baked off, I had to mix the soaking liquid, which I decided to make roughly equal parts of all the remaining milks.

That means we still had Muscle Milk, coconut milk, goat milk, chocolate milk, condensed sweetened milk, banana milk, black bean and black sesame soy milk, and the camel milk left to contend with. I know at least a few of you will get mad that I did not use Milk of Magnesia (I wasn’t in the market to crap my pants), or breast milk (which I currently do not have on tap), but come on guys, let’s be real. That’s too many milks. Who am I, The New York Times?

At one point during the mixing process, I discovered that the combination of the comingling milk resembled the surface of Jupiter, which I found pretty mesmerizing.

There’s a few milk products in this lineup you’re possibly not familiar with. If you’re not someone who’s constantly chasing sick gains at the gym, you may never have had occasion to enjoy the delicacy known as Muscle Milk, which is not actually milk made out of human muscles. It’s basically just a protein shake with kind of a gross name.

Banana milk is a popular boxed dairy milk product from South Korea that’s just sweetened artificial banana-flavored milk. If you like banana-flavored Laffy Taffy you’ll probably like this stuff quite a bit. The black bean and black sesame soy milk is also a Korean drink, and it’s a sweet one combining soy milk with an earthy sesame flavor that makes it almost taste like chocolate.

Oh yeah, and the camel milk.

This is indeed milk from a camel, from a company called Camelicious. It cost us $4.49 for a 7.1 ounce bottle of it, and you absolutely know Davida and I had to try it before I poured it into the trece leches cake liquid.

I don’t know how to describe this properly. Camel milk is definitely not like any other milk I’ve ever had before. It tastes a little bit like a farm smells, and leaves a bit of a wet sock aftertaste in your mouth, with a slight bit of saltiness. I do not mean any of this in a bad way, either—since these are all new flavors to me, I don’t know how to describe them properly. I’d be a horrible camel milk salesman.

Davida and I sampled the eight-milk blend once it was complete, and to our surprise, it was pretty delicious. She likened it to “the milk after you finish a bowl of Lucky Charms,” which I’d say is a pretty accurate description.

Once the cake came out of the oven and cooled off for a bit, I poked a bunch of holes in it and ladled what felt like a half gallon of liquid on top.

I mean, I completely doused this thing in the eight-milk blend, and the cake kept soaking it all up. The Pyrex pan got heavier and heavier until I wasn’t sure adding more milk was a good idea, so I decided to call it a night. I covered the cake in plastic wrap and let it rest in the refrigerator overnight, while cackling about the milks contained therein.

It was nearly time to enjoy the trece leches cake.

I whipped up a batch of whipped cream and started spreading it on top of the cake, which had by now completely soaked up nearly every trace of liquid I’d poured on it. Wait, with the addition of whipped cream, was this now…catorce leches cake?!

What had I done?! What kind of monster was I?

I sprinkled some cinnamon sugar on top of the trece leches cake and it was finally time to cut ourselves a slice.

But not before we put a candle on top and lit it, of course.

Five years is a long time to continuously be working on the same project, and it’s been a fun ride, with all of you on the bus with me, hollering out the window along the way. What I haven’t mentioned is that in October of this year, I’ll have officially have been causing trouble with food for not five, but 10 full years, if you count the shenanigans on my old blog, The Pizzle, which is where all the madness began back in 2014.

(Fun fact, Harvey made his first official appearance on Thanksgiving of that year. Mr. Bee came later. Pepper joined the crew in late 2019.)

I started doing all this stupid shit with food because I was burnt out on food writing back then, thinking I’d torch my career spectacularly and find some other way to spend my time. But apparently me eating cat food didn’t get me kicked out of food writing, it just dragged me further in, got me on podcasts, gave me a cover story at a magazine I only dreamed about writing for back in the day (which even profiled me separately!), and also netted me a wife.

Then, of course, there’s all of you clowns, who’ve supported me, Davida, the gang, our former cats Cricket and Nugget, along with our current shithead ones, Scorpion and Sub-Zero. You’ve all changed our lives for the better, and I’ve never felt more loved through the hardest times in my life, thanks to you.

Oh yeah. There’s still cake to eat. Everyone loves cake! After my first forkful, I thought to myself, “Huh, it basically just tastes like tres leches cake. But how’s the inside so dry after I poured eight fucking types of milk on it?” Despite this mildly dry center, the milky flavor of the cake grew more intense with each bite, coating my palate with all sorts of fat, from camel milk to coconut milk, to whatever that cyber shit is that they put in Muscle Milk.

It was like just being swallowed up in the essence of all true milk, and frankly, I do not think one human being should experience that much milk at once. It’s like seeing the ass of God. You feel blessed, but also, you didn’t need to know what that was like.

Of course, in classic Dannis fashion, I realized I fucked something up after the fact. Tres leches cake has condensed milk, evaporated milk, and whole milk in it, only one of which I used in today’s experiment. I’m a dumbass. I’d just assumed that out of the 13 milks, the probability of me getting them all right would be high, but nope. I accidentally disrespected the original tres leches cake recipe during the excitement.

I guess that means next year I’ll just have to make quince leches cake. Now who wants a slice of this one?

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Okay, everyone, time for the giveaway part!

My friend Tony B. (no relation to Mr. Bee) has agreed to help me celebrate the 5th birthday of the newsletter, and he said he’ll be happy to send out five sampler boxes of his delicious Tony B’s Steak Chips, along with a shaker of his Burger Banger seasoning.

His chips are delicious. They’re like beef jerky, but if it were turned into a crispy potato chip instead, and I’m pretty amazed he’s able to pull off that texture in a packaged product. (And no, Tony’s not slipping me secret money to say any of this, but he did send me some to try for free, and it’s genuinely delicious.)

All I need from you is to share the newsletter with someone you know, via social media, or maybe link to it from your own newsletter or blog, and send me a screenshot that you did it. You can get ahold of me by replying to this newsletter via email, messaging me via the Substack app, or by shouting and waving your hands somehow on social media to get my attention. Have your entry in by, let’s say, 11:59 p.m. CT, Friday, August 9?

I’ll let you know if you’ve been entered and I’ll pick five people using a random number generator and if you win, you’ll get treats mailed to your front door.

But in the meantime, if you don’t win, buy Tony’s chips anyway, because they’re great, plus you’ll be supporting a small business, aka Tony.

And don’t forget to redeem the 20% off newsletter discount since it’s only good for a week. Don’t worry, I won’t skip town with the cash, I’ve been doing this for 10 years now and I still haven’t gone anywhere, nor have I been given a TV show yet.

Okay, everyone, I’ll be taking next week off the newsletter to celebrate, so I’ll see you after that—but as always, I love you all, and I’ll see you in your inboxes soon with more of the food shenanigans you never knew you needed. You’re the best.