La Leche League

We are taking birth classes with the organization Great Starts here in Seattle. Our teacher is Kim James and our textbook is by a well-known woman in the baby making business. Her name is Penny Simkin and she has written half a billion books on how to have a baby. It is an incredibly supportive and inclusive organization that addresses all birthing styles from the very natural to the ultra medical and every option in between.

Ideally, we are going to try this whole natural thing, but our teacher did make the epidural sound pretty nice, that is until she did a demonstration of all the wires that the pregnant lady gets attached to once any kind of epidural is administered.  Without having done this before, the visual aides made being tethered to a bed seem worse than the pain. But I guess we will learn if that is in fact the case soon enough. I don't want to be one of those people that makes sweeping statements with no idea of what reality is. So while the goal is natural, I don't want to absolutely rule out drugs. I do love drugs, after all.

 

Anyway,  it is almost our turn to bring snacks to baby class. It just happens to be the class all about breast feeding. So my genius idea is to make a Tres Leches Cake. This cake is a very popular cake in Central America, and I am pretty sure it originated in Nicaragua. My dad makes a delicious one, but I hadn't, so I decided to do a practice run this evening. The following pictures are a documentation of the process.

Final Product- for the one I am bringing to class, I will decorate with some raspberries and maybe some fresh mint. But since this is just a practice round, I went basic.

Step 1. Make a cake. Allow to cool completely.

Step 2. Drench with a mixture of milk, sweetened condensed milk, and evaporated milk.

Step 3. Allow the three milk mixture to sink in. 

Optional Step 4. Make a whipped topping with whipping cream, vanilla, and sugar. Spread.

This cake is very moist and very very rich.  It is one of those things where it is best to not look at the nutritional information. All that milk isn't exactly the fat free kind, but hey...it does have a ton of vitamin d and calcium. Very good things for pregnant ladies. So, I will make another one for our Thursday class, and hopefully it will be even better than this one. Rob said he loves it and that it compares to some of the tres leches we had in Costa Rica.

Here's the only problem- I don't actually like Tres Leches cake that much. Its just a bit too rich. And I think the wet texture of the cake is just a little weird. But other people seem to love it. And I do love the idea of bringing a three milk cake to a breast feeding class.