Turn Store-Bought Pound Cake Into A Latin American Dessert With Just 3 Extra Ingredients

Pound cake is a dense, moist, and delightful treat that we usually slice up for an easy snack or dessert spread. And most grocery stores offer their own budget-friendly, freshly baked versions, not to mention packaged pound cake you can grab from name brands like Sara Lee. We've found ways to put a homemade twist on pound cake with a few extra ingredients like fresh fruit and whipped cream. But the pound cake transformation that you have to try is tres leches.

Meaning "three milks," tres leches cake drowns a simple vanilla or chocolate sponge cake in three different types of milk for a melt-in-your-mouth, ultra-rich dessert served at birthday parties and other celebrations around Latin America. Consequently, the three ingredients you need to transform pound cake into a tres leches cake are sweetened condensed milk, heavy cream, and coconut milk. Any flavor of pound cake will work for a tres leches makeover, and it couldn't be easier to make. 

Pound cake is notoriously dense, so you'll want to create a poke cake situation. By poking various holes across the pound cake, you'll allow the milk to penetrate and disperse more easily throughout the cake crumb. Blend a half cup each of coconut milk, heavy cream, and sweetened condensed milk in a bowl before pouring it over the pound cake in measured batches so the milk has time to soak into the cake. After letting the cake marinate in the milk for a few hours in the fridge, the transformation is complete.

Three cans of milk are all you need to turn store-bought pound cake into a favorite Latin American dessert, but you don't have to stop there. Most tres leches cakes have a light and fluffy whipped topping to counter the heaviness of a milk-soaked crumb. And, since heavy cream is one of the three ingredients you'll use in the milk mixture, you can use an extra cup of cream to make a whipped topping by whisking it with sugar and vanilla extract until stiff peaks form. Bring out the flavor of the coconut milk by topping the whipped cream with shredded coconut. Make a horchata-flavored tres leches pound cake by infusing the milk mixture with ground cinnamon and adding an extra pour of horchata to the cake. Garnish with a generous sprinkling of cinnamon.

Add cocoa powder to your milk mixture to pour over chocolate or marble pound cake for a tres leches that'll satisfy chocoholics. Top the whipped cream frosting with chocolate sprinkles or a drizzle of chocolate sauce. For a butter pound cake, you can bring more depth of flavor with a drizzle of salted caramel sauce. Macerated strawberries or blueberry compote with lemon zest would be a deliciously fruity and fresh topping for a tres leches pound cake — with or without a whipped topping. Add some crunch with toasted almond slivers, candied pecans, or peanut butter chips.