Advertisement
Daily Dish

Chocolate maker turns on the sweet heat

By Mary MacVean
Share

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Still feeling overfed? Just looking won’t hurt. This Mayan truffle won a grand prize in the Scovie Awards recently at the Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show in Albuquerque.

The Mayan-theme shell opens to a chile verde ganache and sweet-corn-infused center. It’s among the unusual chocolates Joanne Hansen makes at Bon Bon Bakery and Chocolates, the shop she opened in 2006 at the Bernardo winery in San Diego.

Advertisement

A former mortgage broker, she gave in to a lifelong passion for baking and cooking, inspired by her mother, a wedding cake maker.

‘I kind of grew up with a pastry bag in my hand,’ Hansen, 48, said by telephone from her shop, which she renovated.

Other chocolates she makes are filled with habanero marmalade and tequila cream, smoky chipotle caramel or caramelized blue cheese and pear. For the holidays, she says, she’ll make eggnog truffles, gingerbread truffles and perhaps a pumpkin truffle.

-- Mary MacVean

Daily Dish
Mary MacVean

Mary MacVean is the former Mind & Body editor at the Los Angeles Times. She’s a runner and a cook, and has worked at The Times as morning assignment editor, web liaison, food writer and copy editor. She was a national editor and writer focusing on food at the Associated Press and a features editor and a columnist in Moscow, where she also ran a children’s cooking school. She left The Times in 2015.

Advertisement