Even before serving gooey butter cookies or a pastel-colored shake crowned with candy, Milk Dessert Bar tantalizes customers with the aroma of freshly baked pound cake (lemon-blueberry!) and a four-layer chocolate cake studded with marshmallows.
Cheerfulness prevails, too, from a line of customers that snakes to the door, even on a Tuesday. There are toddlers with grandparents and posses of teens, but unlike home, no mom smacks your hand out of the cookie dough bowl. Instead, a friendly server encourages tastes from a parade of cookie dough flavors, including confetti, pretzel bark, and peanut butter.
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A parade of cookie dough flavors.
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Edible cookie dough is available in flights.
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Milkshake, meet Unicorn.
“People are crazy about all the cookie doughs,” says owner and baker Sharon Cohn, who opened her dessert shop at Poplar and Kirby Parkway in June. “They get it in their shakes, they put it in a cone. One lady took hers home, rolled it in truffles, and froze it to make candy.”
Self-taught, Cohn started baking seriously 10 years as therapy for her father’s passing. A dessert catering business followed. Her concept for a retail shop serving only desserts, coffee, and tea — no other food or alcohol — stemmed from research, vintage recipes, and travel to Los Angeles and New York.
When Sharon Cohn dreamed up Milk Dessert Bar, she turned to her own experiences for inspiration. "What if I mix New York and California with the old and the new and come up with a whole different concept?"
“My mother baked one thing,” Cohn says. “She made a Duncan Hines cake on everybody’s birthday, and that was it.” But Cohn’s grandmother, Lena Cohn, baked from scratch even after she lost her sight. “She wasn’t the best baker, but that fact that she could bake even when she was blind inspired me,” Cohn said.
Black-and-white family photographs hang on the shop’s rear wall, reminders that baking is love and family matters. Cohn’s own son and daughter-in-law, AJ and Madii Kolonis, relocated from Denver to help open the shop. AJ handles operations, while Maddi focuses on marketing. “They do all the things I can’t do,” Cohn says, laughing.
Cohn’s focus on the kitchen ensures a colorful line-up of cakes and cookies, like thin and lacey chocolate chip or Lazy Daisy pound cake topped with coconut and brown sugar. Flavors for cheese cakes, pound cakes, and layer cakes change regularly, based on seasonal ingredients and Cohn’s creative whimsy. “She did a cinnamon roll cheesecake the other day that flew out of here so fast, we didn’t even get a taste,” AJ explains.
Closed Sunday and Monday, Milk Dessert Bar is open u Tuesday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and on weekends from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Up next: Ice cream made in-house.
1789 Kirby Parkway (901-730-0893)
