The Bonbon That Started It All: Gingerbread
By Mareeba, Pretty Fancy Chocolate
When Will and I made our very first bonbons, there were three of them. A Plum & Cardamom marshmallow bonbon, an Apple Pie, and a Gingerbread.
Growing up with a strong German heritage, the smell of warming spices is deeply embedded in my memory, Christmas markets, lebkuchen stacked high on market stalls, spiced cookies cooling on my grandmother's kitchen bench. Ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg. That particular combination of warmth and sweetness that makes you feel, instinctively, that everything is going to be alright.
Will has always loved ginger. It was never going to be anything other than one of our first flavours.
The bonbon
The Gingerbread bonbon is deceptively simple, a single layer, no ganache, no marshmallow. Just a smooth, buttery caramel, flavoured with warming spices and muscavado sugar and enrobed in our 36% caramelised white chocolate.
But the spicing is where the craft lies.
We use four forms of spice to build the flavour - ground cinnamon, fresh ginger, ground cloves and nutmeg - and then layer in certified organic, medicinal grade cinnamon leaf and ginger essential oil, which adds a bright, aromatic top note that ground spice alone cannot achieve. It's the difference between a flavour that sits flat and one that blooms as it melts.
The caramelised white chocolate shell was a deliberate choice. Its warm, butterscotch notes echo the spice without competing with it - a gentler, creamier enrobing than dark chocolate would provide, and one that lets the gingerbread caramel take centre stage.
Still here, still one of our favourites
The Gingerbread has been with us since the beginning. It sits in our Spice Drawer collection alongside seven other spice-inspired bonbons - Balsamic Plums, Banana Pancakes, Cardamom Coffee, Chai Caramel, Dark Orange, Ginger Limoncello, and Spiced Irish Coffee - a collection that celebrates the extraordinary depth of flavour that spices can bring to chocolate.
And when we created the Chocolate Fancies, it felt entirely natural that the Gingerbread would find a new expression there too - this time with a spiced marshmallow, a gingerbread caramel made with real ginger and muscovado, and a lebkuchen base. A nod to those Christmas market stalls, reimagined as a Pretty Fancy layered chocolate.
Some flavours stay with you. This is one of them.
The Gingerbread bonbon is part of our Spice Drawer collection. The Gingerbread Chocolate Fancy is available as part of our core Chocolate Fancies range.