English Mild advice

I'm new to home brewing, and after a successful kit batch I'd like to start creating my own recipes. I came up with the following after some research for an English Dark Mild and I'm open for suggestions and critiques. I tried cross referencing other recipes, the Designing Great Beers book and brewing classic styles. Anyways, the recipe:

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Batch Size: 5.00 gal
Boil Size: 2.71 gal
Estimated OG: 1.036 SG
Estimated Color: 22.5 SRM
Estimated IBU: 18.3 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: - %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
4.00 lb Pale Liquid Extract (8.0 SRM)
1.00 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 80L (80.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Pale Chocolate Malt (180.0 SRM)
1.00 oz Fuggles [4.50%] (60 min)
1.00 oz Fuggles [4.50%] (10 min)
0.75 lb Molasses (80.0 SRM)
1 Pkgs London Ale (White Labs #WLP013)


----------------
Jeff

Your gravity and hop schedule look good, but you might want to tweak your fermentables a little.
Daniels (Designing Great Beers) recommends the following for dark milds:
10-15% crystal - you have 16%
2-3% chocolate (or 1% black) - you have 8%, but it's pale chocolate.
~11% sugar (molasses) - you have 12%
So your recipe isn't far off from Daniels' targets, so you might just want to go with it as it is.

I'll admit that I've been using pale chocolate for a few brews lately and I like it's grainy-nutty flavor, so I'm tempted to say keep the full half pound in there. You might want to knock the crystal down to 12oz. The molasses is a bit too much. I recently brewed a porter with 8oz of blackstrap and it's a very pronounced molasses aroma - like Taddy Porter. So I'll recommend cutting back on the molasses. I make a nut brown with 4oz of ("regular") molasses and it's nice, but you can indeed taste the molasses in there if you know it's there. Or maybe replace the molasses with brown sugar? Note that molasses will not make your beer sweet or give it more body.

If you do decide to cut down on the crystal and molasses, you'll want to add some more extract to make up the gravity.

I really like your grain bill and wouldn't change it. The molasses might be overwhelming like cpt. damage mentioned, but I've never used them in a small beer so I can't speak from personal experience. The one thing I would definitely change though is the 10 minute hop addition. If you want a late hop addition I'd drop it to 0.5 oz or less if you want to keep it to style. If you don't care about staying true to style, you can leave the 1 oz.

There is nary a thing as "too" much crystal malt in dark milds, especially if you get a nice mix of light and dark crystal malts. Pale chocolate is a superb malt, 8% is perfectly acceptable. I'm not crazy about is using molasses in small beers, because you'll definitely taste it in the finished product, pretty strongly. Recipe looks good!

Up front, thanks for the help.
I'm glad to hear I'm not too far off the mark. I think you're right about the molasses. It probably will end being too strong. As far as 10 minute hop addition, I wanted to stick around 1/2 oz (for style) but needed the full oz to get close to BU:GU ratio suggested for milds. Going with both of your suggestions, I've now got:

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Batch Size: 5.00 gal
Boil Size: 2.71 gal
Estimated OG: 1.037 SG
Estimated Color: 20.0 SRM
Estimated IBU: 18.8 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: - %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
5.00 lb Pale Liquid Extract (8.0 SRM)
0.75 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt -120L (120.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Pale Chocolate Malt (180.0 SRM)
1.25 oz Fuggles [4.50%] (60 min)
0.50 oz Fuggles [4.50%] (10 min)
1 Pkgs London Ale (White Labs #WLP013)

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I upped to the 120L Caramel to get closer back to the original SRM and also adjusted the hops to conform to the style and the BU:GU ratio. So, does this seem a little more "correct?"
Also, how much difference do those couple of ounces of Caramel malt make a difference (1lb to 12 oz) and also, is there a convenient way to measure out malt extract?

Also thinking WLP002 needs to be yeast I should go with...

I vote for wlp002 or 1968 if your using liquid yeast. wlp013 is "Worthington White Shield" not a very common yeast. wlp002 is 'Fullers' the classic yeast.