Strawberry balsamic. Blue cheese cardamom. Mashed potato caramel. Chocolatier Ken Obert crafts bonbons with culinary flair. In 2023, one of the first bonbon flavors he made was a milk chocolate one filled with basil-infused chocolate ganache — now a top seller.
“When I realized how good it was,” Ken recalls, “I was like, I wonder what else I can do with this.”
In March 2024, Ken and his wife, Jessie, opened Nona’s Hudson Crafted Confectionery, which is named in honor of “Cocoa Nona,” a family friend who worked at a chocolate shop with Jessie in Cincinnati. In an open kitchen that’s viewable from the counter, the two craft small-batch artisanal chocolates using a variety of white, milk and dark couverture chocolates. These primarily come from Guittard Chocolate Co., which was chosen based on flavor and its use of very clean, simple ingredients.
Popular bonbon flavors include a raspberry linzer, which is a raspberry pate de fruit topped with an almond ganache in dark chocolate, and the well-liked brownie butter. The latter starts with decorating the chocolate mold with stripes of cocoa butter then creating a shell of tempered milk chocolate.
“Tempering is a process of warming the chocolate and then cooling it to a proper temperature that promotes the right crystal structure, giving the chocolate shine,” he says.
Ken dumps the excess chocolate back in and sets it on a vibration table before setting it aside to cool. Then, he mixes a ganache of cream, honey, salt, milk chocolate and browned butter and pipes it into the shell before letting it sit. To finish the treat off, he adds a chocolate cap.
His boozy caramel bonbons are top sellers and are made by adding liquor into the house caramel recipe. A boozy caramel dark chocolate flight box includes pairs like a variety with tequila caramel and a sea salt rim.
“It’s a little bit earthy. It brings out some of that minerality of the tequila,” says Ken. The flight box also includes bourbon and orange bitters-infused caramel, as well as rum-infused caramel with vanilla.
Popular bars include knafeh ($9-$18, Nona’s take on the popular Dubai bar) made with pistachio and kataifi filling in milk chocolate and the peanut butter and jelly milk chocolate bar, filled with a peanut butter gianduja and a strawberry pate de fruit and decorated with an airbrushed pink cocoa butter burst.
Jessie makes chocolate-covered Oreos (two-packs $7, four-packs $12) using designs from a specialized printer.
“[It] prints in cocoa butter ink, so we dip the Oreos, and place the custom transfer sheet before the chocolate sets,” explains Jessie, while creating ones with Ohio and Hudson clocktower designs. “Once we remove the acetate sheet, the image remains.”
In the future, they hope to do bring-your-own-alcohol nights with chocolate pairings and convert their checkout counter into a tasting bar for private events.
Look out for a fall box and Christmas movie-themed box. Jessie’s favorite is the Hartville potato chip milk chocolate bark, while Ken loved doing an olive oil-themed collaborative bonbon box with Olive My Heart — especially a crouton variety. It started with local bread from Awaken Bake Company toasted with olive oil and sea salt and then crushed and added to a gianduja made from olive oil and dark chocolate.
“That was like a whole new discovery. The part I get excited about is learning a new technique,” he says. “It’s so unique and different.”
51 S. Main St., Suite 1, Hudson,
234-269-6100, nonashudson.com
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