If this chocolate looks a little familiar, you're right: this was last year's October chocolate of the Month! Also, for a limited time, we're still making this bonbon in Autumn 2011! You can buy it here.
All of us at LL HQ were aching for this special little bonbon to come around again, and the more we thought about fall chocolates, the more we kept coming back to the magical combination of maple, chestnuts, fat pumpkins, and whiskey. So here we are again, hoping you'll love this chocolate as much as we do.
The details:
Local maple cream + chestnut + local kabocha squash + local Hudson Baby Bourbon whiskey = Autumn Bonbons.
I wanted to capture the essence of fall in Upstate New York in a bonbon, so I gathered up all the fall flavors I loved, then kept messing around until my testers agreed that it was great. This took a while. Pretty much everywhere I went I carried a little box of bonbons and forced (OK, it wasn’t that difficult) people to tell me if there was too little maple, too much squash, and can you taste the chestnut? before I even said a proper hello.
But it was worth it: kabocha squash, grown by one of my favorite farmers, Bart Colucci from Meadowview Farm right down the road from me, is the sweetest, most vibrantly orange squash you’ve ever seen. I use it in my “pumpkin” pies instead of pumpkin, which can be flavorless compared with the deep, rich, desserty flavor of kabocha. The kabocha squash purée is then combined with chestnuts that have been ground to a powder; award-winning, world-famous Tuthilltown Whiskey made just down the road the other direction; maple cream made weekly by Oliverea Schoolhouse Maple, deep in the Catskills just north of us; and a touch of Hawaiian vanilla (hey–it’s as local as you can get for a tropical product!). This amazing mixture is then encased in bittersweet chocolate shells and packed in a box ready for your autumn dessert table.
