Dark chocolate substitutes

Dark chocolate is doing three jobs in a recipe: it brings bitter roasted flavour, it brings sugar, and its cocoa butter is a fat that sets hard when cool. Semisweet does all three, just with more sugar and less bitterness.

Best for

brownies, cookies, ganache, mousse, melting, cakes

The easiest swap there is. A brownie made with 55% semisweet instead of 70% dark tastes sweeter and less intense, and the chocolate edge that makes a dark brownie taste grown-up softens. If that matters, cut the recipe's sugar by 1 teaspoon per ounce of chocolate swapped.

Unsweetened baking chocolate is pure cocoa solids and cocoa butter with no sugar at all, so you are simply adding back the sugar that dark chocolate already contains.

Best for

brownies, cakes, batters, frosting, puddings

The sugar amount is approximate because dark chocolate ranges widely in sweetness; 2 teaspoons per ounce lands roughly at 70%. Works beautifully in anything with a batter, where the sugar dissolves. Less good stirred into a warm ganache, where undissolved sugar can feel gritty, so dissolve it in the cream first.

Cocoa powder is what is left after most of the cocoa butter is pressed out, so you rebuild dark chocolate by adding fat and sugar back. Flavour-wise it is close and often more intensely chocolatey.

Best for

cake batter, brownies, cookies, hot drinks, frosting

This is the one that catches people out. The fat you add is butter or oil, not cocoa butter, so the mixture never sets hard. It is fine anywhere the chocolate is going into a batter, and wrong for ganache, truffles, dipped strawberries or any shiny coating, all of which stay soft and greasy.

Same chocolate, different shape. Chips are made with slightly less cocoa butter and a little added stabiliser so they hold their shape in a hot oven.

Best for

cookies, muffins, quick melting, batters

Melted, chips give a thicker, stiffer, less fluid chocolate than a chopped bar, which shows up most in ganache and glazes. Add a teaspoon of neutral oil per half cup to loosen them. For anything where you want the chocolate to marble or streak through a batter, chop a bar instead.

A real change, not a like-for-like. Milk chocolate has far more sugar, much less cocoa, and added milk solids, so it reads as sweet and creamy rather than deep and bitter.

Best for

cookies, chunks in bakes, children's desserts

A dark chocolate tart made with milk chocolate tastes like a sweet mousse and sets softer, because the milk solids interrupt the cocoa butter. It also thickens and seizes more easily when melted, so keep the heat low. Good in a cookie, poor in anything where the chocolate has to hold a shape.

When dark chocolate is the entire dish, a substitute cannot rescue it. A flourless chocolate cake, a chocolate tart, pots de creme, or a plain ganache are all mostly chocolate by weight, so whatever you use is what you taste.

Best for

knowing when to change plans

The least-bad option is semisweet chocolate with a quarter teaspoon of instant espresso powder and an extra pinch of salt per 8 ounces, both of which read as bitterness and push the flavour darker. If you only have cocoa powder, bake something cocoa-based instead, like a devil's food cake, rather than forcing a tart to work.