Milk Chocolate

I often get the duty of bringing dessert when it comes to visiting friends. I guess that is part of the contract when baking is your profession.

Unfortunately, baking is the last thing I want to do when I am off work. Tell me to make potato salad or my mom's seven layer dip. Dessert? I'll do it, but with some reluctance. Don't get me wrong. I love what I do, but when you do it all day, five days a week for work, there is a stopping point.

Sigh. So, Monday was one of those days where I was commissioned to bring dessert. It was short notice. But when I saw how eager our hosts where when they had asked me, I had to say yes. I didn't want to disappoint them.

So I brought chocolate. You can't go wrong with chocolate. (I also brought some cookies that I baked off at work.)

Our friends happen to love Scharffen Berger Chocolate. I picked up two bars: the semisweet and the milk chocolate with cocoa nibs. (They have a ten year old son, so I figure something on the sweeter side would do.) My family loves bittersweet, so that is naturally the one I gravitate toward. I rarely ate milk chocolate growing up only because we never really kept it around the house. I've only recently gone beyond my bittersweet boundaries.

I often find milk chocolate a bit sweet. But it pairs with some ingredients better than bittersweet because of its sweeter, carmel-like nature. If you pay attention to Scharffen Berger's milk chocolate you can taste the butterscotch notes. I can see it going well in a chocolate chunk cookie with pecans, or mixed with some heat.

Some pastry chefs have mentioned El Rey as a good brand when it comes to milk. So I will give it a go next time. So sorry, Mom and Dad, I can't stick just to bittersweet.