Tres Leche Cupcakes?

Are Tres Leche cupcakes a thing? If so, does anyone have a tried and true recipe they can point me at (preferably scalable since we are a family of two (three when mom visits))? I am trying to think ahead to desserts for Easter. TIA

Sounds messy to me. Why not just make a tres leches and cut into squares. Hard to imagine eating it by hand from a cupcake liner.

1 Like

I don’t want a whole cake for just three servings! So, if a recipe for something that only serves 2-4 that is reputable exists, that might be a feasible solution too. They come up when I Google, certainly, but I’d rather trust folks here versus “some dude with a site on the internet”.

I also have 1 cup ramekins I can bake them in as well (to avoid mess).

1 Like

The nature of tres leches with the rather wet cake (they cake very literally sits in a puddle of sweet milk/creaml)means that getting the sauce distributed well between individual dishes would make this one a challenge at best.

You wouldn’t want to use liners. It’s s sort of the inverse of making a large chocolate lava cake for a group…its not really intended to be scaled.

Ive seen, but have not made, recipes for a 8 x 8 pan. That would be the smallest I’d attempt.

1 Like

That’s a good point. I do have 8x8 pans… :thinking:

Love tres leches. I’ve made a small tres leches in a 5” cake pan, a small (6-7”) bundt, and mini bundtlets, so yes to cupcakes!

I do think you need to think ahead to serving as the cake will be soaked and soft, and you don’t want to be digging it out of a cupcake mold at that point (unless you’re using individual silicone molds that can be easily inverted).

(My last few rounds of tres leches were indianized like this.)

1 Like

Sending good vibes for you and yours, Saregama. You’ve certainly been through it of late.

The folks here in FL wouldnt invert. Not only would that trash the whipped cream and the cherry (has to be there!), but it would upset the balance of drier cake on the top and almost custardy texture saturated in sauce at the bottom

Ooooo! I do have silicone molds too! Thank you (as well as for the link)!

Thanks for the kind words @Sunshine842.

I was just trying to make the point of getting the cupcakes out of the baking molds before soaking, because I could see myself baking them in a 6-cupcake tin and thinking that it’s so easy to just pour the milk mixture on top… and then have the duh moment as I try to get them out later!

1 Like

If I had a recipe that would work for the cake part while baking, I could then transfer the baked cake to ramekins for soaking and serving too, I guess…

This one actually calls for inverting. I havent made this one but this is a really good source.

Make sure that whatever you invert it to is deep enough to hold the puddle! (I made a complete mess of my kitchen when I underestimated platter size for caramel flan…sticky mess everywhere!)

If you were here, Id bring you a small one from one of our local bakeries! Even Publix makes good tres leches.

You could also just bake in the ramekins, no? My pyrex 2 other brands of 5-6oz “custard cups” are cupcake size.

Traditional tres leches uses a light, airy sponge - so if you have a sponge recipe you like, just go with that. (My ricotta cake version was lovely, but much richer than the usual.)

I saved this and this when I was researching, and one of my ricotta cakes was adapted from yossy arefi’s recipe, another from a couple of blog sources.

(Fwiw I don’t like the whipped cream part of tres leches and usually skip it in favor of extra soaking milks.)

1 Like

That was also one of my original thoughts. Mostly, I just need to figure out how to scale the ingredients and bake time down in that case (mostly the latter).

I think I would like to find a chocolate sponge, then. I am looking to backwards engineer this chocolate tres leche cake we had when we visited Black Sheep in Las Vegas: