Baba au rhum — to my mind — is the king of soaked desserts. I make mine with a lot of orange, vanilla and, because even in the French countryside I cannot escape my Appalachian leanings, black pepper. Then, along with a few good extra glugs of straight rum, a little for the cake “and a little for me” à la Julia Child, I soak the brioche for a whole day and night and serve it, on the second night, with lightly sweetened crème-fraîche whipped cream and candied orange.
Bread puddings, custardy French toasts, berry-infused trifles — these are all also great “leftover” soaks, a terrible turn of phrase but one that sums up the duty at hand quite well. Where we get into a more sophisticated soak, however, is the cake that is not a leftover but rather one made specifically to absorb. A classic sponge cake is made especially for these purposes. Here, soaking approaches an art form. In Vienna, for example, Demel bakery (opened in 1786) sells a rum-soaked sponge cake layered in vanilla custard, then covered in meringue, flamed and decorated with candied violets and pistachios. It is magnificent to behold and even more magnificent to savor slowly as you sip your espresso on the second-floor cafe, overlooking the busy Viennese streets.
I’m a pretty secular person. But this cake is probably as close to a religious experience as I’ll ever have.
For me, though, the soaked cake really comes alive, and gets personal, in tres-leches cake. If baba au rhum is the king, this, my friends, is the queen. Its origins are disputed. Mexico and Nicaragua are among the countries that claim it. What we do know is that it has its beginnings in colonialism, possibly drawing influences from British trifle and even Italian soaked cakes like tiramisu or zuppa inglese. The version we know today, a dense but softly crumbed yellow cake saturated with three milks, as its name suggests, stemmed in part from a breadlike cake layered with custard and soaked in wine and evolved to include sweetened condensed and evaporated milk as companies like Nestlé expanded into Latin America. Eventually, the recipe for tres leches dropped the alcohol and added more milks, spreading in popularity.
While my work notably explores Southern and Americana desserts, I started toying with the idea of putting a version of the cake on my menu, a nod to my mother and grandmother, both Mexican Native Americans by way of New Mexico and Southern California. They soothed me with warm milk when I was a small, bug-bitten, clay-covered scrappy thing in southern Georgia, giving me a cinnamon stick to stir and cool it with. But I struggled to find a place for it in the market I was working in.
