Tres Leches Cake

Good God, Charlie Brown, it's EARLY! It's about 6:50 am and I'm trying to slap myself awake to go play tennis with my father. We have been pretty good about it all week. I played on Wednesday and Thursday mornings. On Thursday, after an hour+ of tennis, we came back and repaved a bit of the walkway in the backyard. See these hands? They swung a sledge hammer and broke several hundred pounds of concrete. Then they moved the concrete, broke it into smaller pieces, extracted some dying zucchini plants, tilled the land, filled in the walkway with hardcore, and POURED 400 pounds of concrete. By hand.

My right hand has a beautiful blister. It doesn't have the fluid filled stuff yet. It's just at the stage where it's red and very upset. When I was playing yesterday, the skin squidged together as I held the racket. Then, as I opened my hand, I could hear the skin separating like two pieces of duct tape being ripped apart. Lovely. I've been looking up how to avoid hand trauma. Many people recommend taping it before it becomes a problem. But when it's a blister, super glue is suppose to be god's gift to tender skin.

Baking:
I have been making a lot of sweet breads lately. I made a true brioche loft (pretty good when fresh out of the oven but then got dry and too crusty/flaky), a cinnamon swirl bread and some monkey bread. With regular bread dough I made some dinner rolls of varying sizes in muffin/cupcake tins. There is another bucket of brioche/sweet dough in the fridge ready to be made into cinnamon swirl bread.

My excuse:
There are no pictures of the monkey bread because my parent's friends descended upon it like flying turtles in a pond. My parents had a little gathering on Wednesday. I made monkey bread that day. In the morning, I cut the dough into small pieces, rolled it into a ball shape and then covered it with brown sugar and cinnamon. I made a little too much because a few balls fell out of the loaf pan and onto the baking sheet. It was so delicious. There was none left at the end of the gathering. And I couldn't find the camera in time to take photos.

My mother has requested more monkey bread, which I am happy to oblige. The brown sugar caramelizes and turns the whole thing into a beautiful doughnut-like texture bite with sweetness and tender bread.

Current food obsession: Tres Leches Cake - good or bad?
Tres Leches cake is a traditional Mexican or Spanish cake. There are as many recipes as there are regions in Mexico, or taquerias in San Francisco. Each one is slightly different. In some, the sponge is more firm. In others, the sponge is like a cake. Some recipes use the three milks in a consistency like a syrup. Others have more liquid milk-like milks.

Do I like this kind of cake? Or do I not like the whole category? It seems to consistently give me a stomach ache if I eat too much of it (more than 3 spoonfuls). YET I CANNOT STOP MYSELF. Especially in the morning when my will power is at its lowest. Like now.

I want to make a tres leches cake to try it out. But if I make it, I'm committed to a certain volume of 3 milk mixture (at least 2 full cans of milk). And I think I would get really really sick of it way before I got through that. How to make a smaller, sized down version?

In the meantime, I've been buying it from panaderias. And I bought it once from a hippie dippie trendy deli location in San Francisco. Each time, it was really sweet. And gave me a stomach ache.

On to change into tennis clothing.