The 5 Best Desserts Around Summit County

Dessert is where technique and imagination often meet most visibly. A pastry chef can turn butter, sugar, flour, eggs, chocolate and fruit into everything from a carefully decorated celebration cake to a crisp French macaron, while an ice cream maker works with temperature and texture to create an entirely different kind of finish. Summit County’s sweet side covers that spectrum, with custom cakes, fresh bakery cases, handcrafted macarons and small-batch ice cream among the choices. The Best of Summit recognizes local businesses giving diners plenty of reasons to leave room at the end of a meal — or skip straight to something sweet.

Baked In Breck

Baked In Breck specializes in desserts made to order, giving customers considerable freedom to build a cake or cupcake around a favorite flavor, color scheme, memory or event theme. Cake choices range from vanilla bean, chocolate and red velvet to chai spice, carrot, lemon, brown butter and cookie butter, with fillings such as salted condensed milk caramel, fruit compote, chocolate mousse and whipped matcha vanilla bean ganache. Signature combinations take the experimentation further. S’mores layers a graham cracker crust with chocolate cake, chocolate mousse and toasted marshmallow meringue, while Matcha Madness combines vanilla cake, matcha ganache, raspberry compote and matcha Swiss meringue buttercream. Cheesecakes come in flavors including raspberry, pumpkin spice, Oreo, dulce de leche and turtle.

Butterhorn Bakery & Cafe

Butterhorn Bakery & Cafe has spent more than four decades baking fresh each morning on Frisco’s Main Street. Everything on its menu is made from scratch, and the bakery case is an important part of an operation that also serves breakfast and lunch. Cinnamon rolls are a house specialty and even cross over onto the breakfast menu as Cinnamon Roll French Toast. Cookies include familiar varieties such as snickerdoodle and peanut butter, while croissants and other baked items give customers plenty of options for pairing something sweet with coffee or espresso. Butterhorn also moves into larger celebrations through its wedding cake program, extending its baking beyond the daily café routine. The result is a bakery where dessert can take several forms: something selected from the case after lunch, a cinnamon-heavy morning indulgence or a cake designed for one of life’s bigger occasions.

Pat + Bear Macarons

Pat + Bear Macarons concentrates on one of French pastry’s most recognizable sweets. A traditional macaron brings together two delicate almond-based shells with a filling in the center, a deceptively simple format that depends on precise mixing, piping and baking to achieve its characteristic smooth top and light texture. Pat + Bear turns that format into a specialty business, creating macarons in an assortment of flavors and colors rather than treating them as one item in a larger pastry case. Their small size makes it possible to combine several varieties in a single assortment, while their decorative appearance lends itself naturally to gifts, celebrations and dessert displays. From its Keystone base, Pat + Bear gives Summit County a dessert option devoted specifically to the craft of the French macaron.

Blue Moon Bakery

Blue Moon Bakery has been part of Silverthorne’s bakery scene since 1999, combining everyday sweets with desserts intended for larger celebrations. Its bakery selection includes cookies, brownies, bars, muffins, scones and other baked treats, giving customers choices that range from a quick pastry to something brought home for later. Cakes expand the bakery’s role beyond the daily display case. Blue Moon creates custom cakes for weddings, birthdays and other occasions, allowing customers to select a dessert around the needs of an event rather than relying solely on ready-made options. The business also operates as a breakfast and lunch café, so sweets share the kitchen with sandwiches, soups, salads and morning dishes.

Higgles Ice Cream

Higgles Ice Cream began in 2011 as Anna Higgins’ one-woman mobile business, producing small batches in shared commercial kitchens for farmers markets, events, independent grocers and restaurants. It has since grown into a Breckenridge shop and small commercial kitchen where customers can see ice cream being made. The flavor catalog demonstrates just how far Higgins takes the small-batch idea: Higgles has developed hundreds of flavors spanning chocolate, coffee, fruit, nuts, seasonal specialties, sorbets and vegan recipes. Daily selections rotate, mixing classics such as vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and butter pecan with creations including honey lavender, pumpkin chai, chocolate ooey gooey cake and coconut cardamom. Fruit ice creams derive their flavor from fruit, with an effort to source Colorado-grown produce when possible, while seasonal sorbets use fruit juice or purée rather than flavorings.

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