Tres Leches cake is one of my regular orders when a restaurant has it on the menu, and the part I look forward to most is the sweetened milk the sponge sits in: creamy, rich and a little like caramel. That made Tres Leches by Coastal Clouds an easy pick for this review. I had already reviewed two juices from the same maker, Maple Butter and Peach Tea, and liked both, so the question was whether the cake would survive the move into a tank.
The verdict first
My score is 8 out of 10. This was my first tres leches e-liquid, and it is the only one with that flavor I know of. What you get is a dense cake note with milky sweetness behind it. The caramel that dominates the smell of the liquid is weaker once it is vapor, which is the main reason the score is not higher. It goes very well with a morning coffee, though I did not keep it to breakfast and ended up using it through the day.
How it vapes
For anyone who has not eaten the dessert: it is a sponge cake soaked in three kinds of milk, namely heavy cream, evaporated milk and condensed milk. The slice comes out light but very wet, close to melting as you eat it, with a smooth, mild sweetness that suits a coffee after dinner.
From the bottle, the juice smells strongly of caramel and milk. The first pull was more restrained than that. A light sweetness arrives on the inhale and builds as you breathe out, and the exhale is where a milky cake taste shows up that the smell had not hinted at. A soft caramel sweetness stays on the tongue afterwards. Overall the caramel is bigger in the aroma than in the cloud.
Breathing the cloud back in was very sweet and pleasant. Throat hit was gentle yet satisfying, with no burn and no urge to cough. Several pulls in quick succession did leave me slightly dizzy, so if nicotine affects you easily, take your time between hits.
A traditional tres leches recipe has no caramel in it, but caramel is clearly a main note here. The overall effect is light and sweet and reminded me of caramel coffee creamer. It did not turn dull after repeated hits, and I refilled the tank several times. It shares a lot with Coastal Clouds Maple Butter, especially the rich sweetness and how good the cloud smells on the way back in, but Tres Leches is the gentler of the two; the brown sugar in Maple Butter is cloying by comparison.
Filling the tank
The 60mL bottle is tinted so dark it is nearly black. I had to hold it against a light to judge the level and the thickness, and the color of the liquid stayed a mystery until it was in the tank. The childproof cap unscrewed without trouble and the narrow tip sat neatly in the fill port. I squeezed carefully, but the bottle feels sturdy and nothing spilled over even under firm pressure.
In the tank the juice turned out to be very pale, close to clear. My guess is that this explains the dark bottle, since sunlight can caramelize the sugar in an e-liquid and darken it. It is thin and watery and moves freely in the tank. A cautious sniff at the open bottle gave me heavy caramel over sweet cream, which I recognized straight away as tres leches cake.
Box and label
Product photos for Coastal Clouds juices come in two versions because the company reworked its images and packaging to comply with FDA regulations. The flavor is identical in either packaging. The range runs to thirty e-liquids across fruit, menthol and dessert profiles, which is a lot of variety from one company.
The current Tres Leches box is thin paper, black all over, with white lettering and white banners. The earlier design used bright type and pictures of desserts; this one looks more grown-up and is unlikely to be accused of appealing to underage users. The bottle label reverses the scheme, black print on white.
- Front: the Coastal Clouds name and its revised logo, with a black banner above them giving the size (60mL) and nicotine strength (3mg). The flavor name sits lower down, next to a note that this is not food and is meant only for vaping.
- Left side: a plain banner stating that the product contains nicotine and that nicotine is an addictive chemical.
- Right side: warnings, age and sale restrictions, and the poison control number in case the liquid gets on the user.
- Lower label and base: ingredients, manufacturing details and a barcode, with the expiration date and batch number stamped in yellow ink underneath the bottle.
One gap: neither the box nor the label gives the VG/PG ratio, and the Coastal Clouds website did not list it when I looked. Other sites selling Tres Leches gave it as 70/30 VG/PG.
Who it suits
Taste is personal and vapers argue about flavor endlessly, so the only real test of this dessert juice is your own tank. If you are unsure which dessert flavors might suit you, ejuice.deals can be reached by email, phone or social media. The review that followed this one covered Vapetasia Royalty II, our first tobacco flavor review.