Chocolate Tres Leches Cake

It's no secret that Anand loves chocolates. So, to celebrate his milestones and achievements, I have been trying different variations of chocolate-based desserts. I gave him a few options for his recent achievement, and he picked this one - a chocolate tres leches cake. A Tres Leches cake is a South-American cake that is made with three types of milk (tres leches) - condensed milk, evaporated milk, and whole milk/cream. After a bit of research, I followed the recipe from here. The recipe is pretty accurate and reliable - if you faithfully follow every step and reserve a whole day to get this cake ready.

This cake has an ice-cream like custard sandwiched between two layers of rich chocolate cake. Putting together the entire cake is a bit time-consuming. It's not really labor intensive as the individual steps are mostly easy and straightforward. But, time was a major battle for me because the custard in the middle took forever to complete - the milk and cream had to be heated up and cooled, then mixed with lots of egg-yolks, then baked for 50 minutes, then cooled at room temperature for some time, then cooled in the freezer for sometime, then transferred to a plastic-wrapped plate and frozen for 4 hours. Then, it is assembled between the cooled chocolate cake layers. A creamy rum sauce is poured over it and again chilled for 2 hours. So, I was scrambling for bits and pieces of time to get this done, and as fate always has it, everything something had to go wrong! For one, the trusty oven mysteriously turned itself off in the middle of baking the chocolate cake that was rising beautifully. My dim-witted brain took 35 minutes to figure out something was wrong with the oven after pondering hard over why the cake took so long to bake... it took three times as long to get this delicious cake to finally bake - which meant, more frantic scrambling of time. This is the day when I also get to hear of parties and visitors and deadlines within the next 12 hours. Wait, there's more. As I transfer the custard onto the plate, part of it falls off the plate, almost ruining 2 1/2 hours of work. I try to think quick, pull the broken/fallen custard into a mass, wrap it in plastic and freeze it at the highest setting, periodically shaping it to resemble a nice disc. 

Anyway, after all the frustration with the custard, I wasn't wowed by the final product. The custard doesn't seem worth the effort. I would recommend skipping it. But then, my personal goof-ups could have been the reason for the sub-par custard.The chocolate cake is pretty delicious, though - but then, it isn't a tres leches cake without the custard. Well, maybe the sauce that's soaked into the chocolate cake would make up for it. 

Finally, I macerated some berries in a couple of teaspoons of sugar and Grand Marnier for an hour, and topped them on the finished cake. 

P.S: Thank you so much Sindhu, for the many lovely pictures of the cake!