Latin desserts sweeten menus: chefs embrace variations on tres leches, other traditional favorites

Nation's Restaurant News, Sept 9, 2002 by Jack Hayes

Frazier also makes cajeta, a strong goat's milk caramel. Like Krinsky and Albarracin in their tres leches, Frazier uses equal parts of cream, evaporated milk and condensed milk.

For Albarracin's tres leches recipe, chocolate syrup is added to the three traditional milks -- condensed and evaporated milk and heavy cream. That mixture is used to soak a light chocolate cake which is topped with house-made chocolate mousse.

"Here in south Florida you find tres leches in many restaurants," explains Albarracin, who remembers his mother making it for Sunday dessert every weekend when he was a boy. "In Central America it's the equivalent of New York's apple pie."

While respectful of the Nicaraguan recipe his mother followed, Albarracin experimented with four different Caribbean fruit flavors-- mango, guava, pineapple and passion fruit--when he was developing his chocolate tres leches adaptation.

"I don't know why there aren't more flavors being tested with this dessert," Albarracin says. "Today you can name any flavor you want, but most everyone stays with vanilla. Not at Bahama Breeze, though. We want to do something different."

Albarracin says it's not uncommon to find a tres leches dessert topped with manjar blanco instead of meringue or whipped cream.

"When they do it this way," he says, laughing, "they have to call it cuatro leches."