CD's birthday cake: a success story

Growing up in Chile, my favorite cake was Torta de Mil hojas, which translates to Thousand layer cake. It had been a long time since I'd eaten it and my idealized version sorta contained flaky pastry interlayered with "manjar" (dulce de leche to the rest of South America?) On my most recent visit there, I made a point of getting some cake (as much as I could eat really) and I even got some to-go after an inport, so that for a couple of days after going out to sea, we were still eating cake. It was awesome, but quite different than my idealized version. The bready/cake layers were not flaky, in fact they were more like thin flat bread or cracker layers. The layers are not sweet in themselves which makes sense since the manjar is so rich.

When I asked CD what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday, he mentioned repeating the coconut cake that I had made earlier this month for Easter or his wording might have been more along the lines of "whatever". He likes most of the cakes that I've made for him and his long-time favorite (usually made for his birthday) is carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. This year, I wanted to try something new and I had the manjar already made (bought in Chile- thanks Sis!) which CD loves, just loves.

I found a recipe online and went to work. This recipe is somewhat labor intensive, but so worth it! It tasted just like I remembered. Delicioso!!

To start, make dough and divide into 10 balls which you roll out into 9" discs to be baked

Baked layers (not quite round)

Manjar!! (to make it at home, just boil a can of sweetened condensed milk (in the can!) for 3 hours making sure that the water in your pot doesn't boil away)

Moisten the layers with a bit of brandy (I used some lucuma liqueur since I didn't have brandy on hand) before covering with manjar and beginning the layering.

I adorned the finished product with some walnuts:

CD loved his cake. Happy Birthday!

I know you're wondering what happened to the other half of the cake... we couldn't wait until dinner. We had been invited to Craig and Stephanie's for a lovely dinner in CD's honor, but earlier in the afternoon, we dove into the cake (ha!)