Milk powder doesn't dissolve

Question

I'm following some recipes making chocolate, candies and cookies that use milk powder to enhance the flavor. I tried several milk powder brands, different types skim vs full cream, but I never can dissolve milk powder completely. My dough/batter always end up with a lot of milk powder chunks. How can I avoid this?

To make chocolate, I mixed milk powder, cocoa powder and icing sugar with coconut oil.

For cookie dough, after creaming butter and egg, I added flour and milk powder.

To make candies, I melted butter and marshmallow then finalized with milk powder.

Answer 1

Milk powder is not supposed to dissolve in fat, so you will never get a perfectly smooth product here.

The closest you can do is to disperse the milk powder well. This quite finicky. I prefer the technique where you carefully blow small amounts of the powder into a mixer running at high speed (this won't work if you have a very stiff mass). It will get rid of the lumps you describe, but there will be a noticeable graininess left. Trying different brands is also helpful, as some are milled finer than others - just feel with your fingers which is the softest.

Answer 2

From Chocolate Making Adventures (paragraph 4):

Milk powder won't dissolve into cocoa butter, so the trick is to make the powder so fine that the tongue cannot detect the grains. If your milk powder already has the consistency of flour, you can use it 'as is'.

The same would likely apply for butter, as the main focus is the fat. So if your milk powder already has the consistency of flour, you can try to grind it down until it is so.

Finally, instead of scooping/pouring the milk powder into the mixture, use a sieve to gradually sift the powder in as you stir.