16 Luscious Recipes Featuring Milk Chocolate (2024)

Milk chocolate may not be as assertive as its semisweet and bittersweet counterparts, but its creamy mouthfeel contributes a luxuriousness that stands on its own. Here, we've gathered a selection of recipes that showcase what milk chocolate has to offer. Some of these treats highlight pure milk chocolate, while others combine it with bittersweet chocolate for the best of both worlds, approximating the flavor of those small-batch dark milk chocolate bars that we're seeing pop up more frequently. Whether you like your milk chocolate paired with peanut-y goodness or prefer something like an unadulterated, silky custard, you're bound to find what you're looking for in this collection of milk chocolate delights.

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Chocolate Ganache Sandwich Cookies

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Pastry chef Paola Velez's recipe for these chocolate sandwich cookies creates crisp, buttery cookies filled with rich, fluffy milk chocolate ganache. The creamy filling is made with chocolate and butter instead of the usual heavy cream, resulting in a softer ganache.

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Mudslide Meringues

16 Luscious Recipes Featuring Milk Chocolate (2)

Dark chocolate batter and espresso meringue are swirled together and studded with coarsely chopped milk chocolate for a chewy, crisp marbled gluten-free cookie that's reminiscent of its namesake co*cktail.

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Milk Chocolate Chip Cookies

16 Luscious Recipes Featuring Milk Chocolate (3)

Chef Tim Love 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.

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Chocolate Cardamom Cream Tart with Pistachio-Sesame Brittle

16 Luscious Recipes Featuring Milk Chocolate (4)

This fancier cousin to a chocolate cream pie gets complex depth from a combination of bittersweet and milk chocolate, and plenty of richness from heavy cream. A touch of cardamom in the custard and the whipped cream topping, plus the contrasting crunch of homemade nut brittle, elevate this dessert far above the ordinary.

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Hong Kong Milk Tea Tiramisu

16 Luscious Recipes Featuring Milk Chocolate (5)

Milk chocolate is finely grated over this subtly sweet and well balanced tiramisu just before serving. Hong Kong milk tea powder provides lightly bitter tannins.

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Chocolate Babka

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This amazing chocolate babka from pastry chef Melissa Weller gets extra flavor in the swirl fromchocolate cookiecrumbs. As a bonus, the tender-crumbed babka is topped with a thick and lusciouschocolate glaze. Both the swirl and the glaze are made with a mix of bittersweet and milk chocolate.

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Milk Chocolate Tart with Pretzel Crust

16 Luscious Recipes Featuring Milk Chocolate (7)

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.

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Crunchy Milk Chocolate-Peanut Butter Layer Cake

16 Luscious Recipes Featuring Milk Chocolate (8)

The genius of this layer cake is its extraordinarily crunchy filling, made with almonds, salted peanuts, creamy peanut butter, chocolate, and Rice Krispies. The silky milk chocolate ganache frosting almost pushes the recipe over the top.

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Milk Chocolate Pots de Crème

16 Luscious Recipes Featuring Milk Chocolate (9)

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 super-silky and dense.

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Quadruple Chocolate Brownies

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By swirling chunks of white, milk, and bittersweet chocolate into a batter made with unsweetened chocolate, then melting and drizzling more all over the top, chocolatier Michael Recchiuti says this sweet has "all the chocolates I like in one brownie."

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Milk Chocolate-Frosted Layer Cake

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This cake from pastry chef Karina Gowing is perfection for anyone who loves frosting. The ultra-creamy icing, which is almost like a milk chocolate ganache, gets spread liberally over layers of light, delicate, cocoa-flavored cake.

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Milk Chocolate Banana Pie

16 Luscious Recipes Featuring Milk Chocolate (12)

For this delectable tart, a golden hazelnut shortbread crust is lined with rum-tinged bananas and topped with creamy milk chocolate custard. Serve it with a dollop of gently whipped cream and a light dusting of cocoa powder.

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Warm Double-Chocolate Brownie Cakes

16 Luscious Recipes Featuring Milk Chocolate (13)

Brownie meets cake in this fun dessert from Emily Luchetti, cookbook author and executive pastry chef at Marlowe, Park Tavern, and The Cavalier Restaurants in San Francisco. 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.

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Chocolate Pots de Crème with Maple Caramel and Salt

16 Luscious Recipes Featuring Milk Chocolate (14)

Former Le Bernardin pastry chef Michael Laiskonis serves this milk-chocolaty dessert in an eggshell with caramel foam; it's known as "the egg." It's just as good in ramekins, topped with a simple caramel sauce blended with maple syrup.

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Milk Chocolate–Peanut Custards

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Instead of loading his custard with cream, San Francisco chef Matthew Accarrino uses just a bit, along with low-fat chocolate milk and silken tofu, for texture. He also opts to include roasted peanuts, which add terrific flavor and a little crunch.

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Double-Chocolate Hot Chocolate

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Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, owners of Baked in New York City, firmly believe that homemade hot chocolate is superior to any commercial mix. They make their decadent version with both bittersweet and milk chocolate and then top it with marshmallows.

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