Milk-Chocolate Dessert Buffet
Food snobs generally prefer dark chocolate, the more bitter the better. But some of America’s top pastry chefs are proclaiming their love for creamy milk chocolate—which contains milk in addition to sugar and cocoa butter. The recipes here are good enough to lure anyone from the dark side.
Pot de crème (“pot of cream”) is a traditional French custard typically served in a pot-shaped cup. This milk-chocolate version from pastry chef Frank Urso is supersilky and dense.
Milk-Chocolate Cookies with Malted Cream
Pastry chef Mathew Rice grew up loving an Oreo-like sandwich cookie called Murray Chocolate Cremes. In this homage, he creates a malty filling for milk-chocolate wafers by mixing butter and sugar with Ovaltine.
Milk-Chocolate Tart with Pretzel Crust
This dessert from pastry chef Colleen Grapes, a tribute to the chocolate-covered pretzel, hits just the right salty-sweet note. Grapes mixes crushed pretzels with flour, butter, sugar and egg to make a crunchy crust, pours in a luxurious milk-chocolate filling, then sprinkles on more crushed pretzels as a garnish.
Silky Chocolate Mousse with Peanut Butter Crunch
Any chocolate and peanut butter lover will adore this elegant dessert from pastry chef Rachel Lansang-Hidalgo. She tops a rich milk-chocolate mousse with a roasted-peanut cream and addictively crunchy cornflakes mixed with peanut butter, milk chocolate and peanuts.
Milk-Chocolate-Frosted Layer Cake
This cake from pastry chef Karina Gowing is perfection for anyone who loves frosting. The ultracreamy icing, which is almost like a milk-chocolate ganache, gets spread liberally over layers of light, delicate, cocoa-flavored cake.
Warm Double-Chocolate Brownie Cakes
Brownie meets cake in this fun dessert from Emily Luchetti, a cookbook author and executive pastry chef. She bakes the batter in muffin cups so the edges turn crispy and chewy like a brownie, but the inside becomes soft and fluffy like a cake.
Chef-owner Tim Love of Fort Worth, Texas’s Lonesome Dove Western Bistro re-creates his mother’s cookies here: They’re crunchy on the outside, soft in the center and loaded with milk-chocolate chips instead of the usual semisweet kind.
Warm Milk-Chocolate Croissant-Bread Pudding
Chef Roger Freedman created this indulgent recipe almost by accident: “I was making bread pudding at the Bistro and ran out of bread. I happened to have day-old croissants on the shelf, so I thought I’d give them a try. It turned out the croissants added a richness that bread wouldn’t have.” Freedman folds the pastries into a chocolate custard mixed with bits of chopped milk chocolate, then bakes everything in one big dish.
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