Plantagenet Rose, located on Grandin Road in Roanoke, now carries Baylee’s Best Chocolates. In addition, the handmade truffles, caramels and candies are also available at a growing number of merchants including Tinnell’s Finer Foods, Back Creek Sweets and Treats, Sumdat Farm Market in downtown Roanoke and Ve Va Chi in Salem.
Bayla Bonney's Baylee's Best. The chocolates and truffles are created in Roanoke and are available at Tinnell's, Sumdat Farm Market, and other places around the valley. Photo: Douglas Miller
For now, Bonney is owner and sole employee (though husband Mike helps out too), some days spending as much as 18 hours stirring chocolate, making marshmallows and packaging products in her Roanoke home. She is contracted with H & R Block year round but during the off season works only as needed. A theatre major in college, Bonney also has a talent agent in Charlotte.
From café au lait to l’orange, peppermint to rum coco, cherry to deep dark chocolate, these truffles have a fluffier texture that “oozes all over your mouth,” Bonney says.
In addition to truffles, Bonney produces her own pretzel pops – a pretzel rod smothered with caramel, then dipped in a heavy coating of chocolate – satisfying a sweet and salty craving at once. Her “Gimmee S’mores” are an impressive twoand- a-half inches long and inch-and-a-half tall and wide – one inch of that homemade marshmallow. New products include orange peel dipped in fresh dark chocolate and strawberry glacé, dried strawberries boiled to a gel consistency, enrobed in chocolate. She also makes butter toffee, caramels and “Coffee Complements,” chocolate covered spoons flavored with amaretto, hazelnut and cinnamon, perfect for adding a rich twist to hot drinks.
The truffles are available in one ounce and four ounce containers, but Bonney doesn’t mix flavors. “The chocolate picks up odors and flavors,” she explains. “I don’t want an entire box tasting like mint or orange.”
One ounce, with two to three chocolates, runs about $3 and four ounces is around $10.
Bonney hopes to move into a retail space by fall, and eventually she’d like to open a chocolate café, an idea sure to attract chocoholics near and far.
