Treat your adult friends with these tricky drinks and sweets this Halloween
By Dave DeSimone / For the Post-Gazette
Halloween means handing out candy to the delight of little trick-or-treaters in costumes. But with a little imagination, adults can have fun of their own — costumes optional — by offering delicious, artisan liqueurs with grown-up confectionery delights.
Instead of rummaging through your kid’s stash on Halloween night, grab these intriguing treats from France and right here in Pennsylvania.
Fun French treats and liqueur
Artisans living deep in the French rural countryside have for centuries produced traditional sweet treats to tempt the taste buds.
Since 1880, Noel Cruzilles, Pâtes de Fruits d'Auvergne has offered delicious fruit treats in decorative tins. The confections ($34 for a 11.6-ounce tin on Amazon.com) come from fresh fruits such as apricots, strawberries, black currants, oranges and pears. They are made into a paste and cooked with sugar. Then a little added pectin allows the fruit to set into soft, colorful jellies bursting with fresh fruit aromas and flavors.
The Pâtes de Fruits come from France’s Auvergne, one of Europe’s least populated regions. The area features high mountains, dormant volcanoes and dense oak forests. Fortune smiled on the Auvergne when French royalty made the Pâtes de Fruits into a fashionable sweet treat. Today, many French restaurants serve them as complimentary desserts. And at Christmas, the decorative tins are a popular gift.
In France’s Rhône Valley, an area known best for its terrific wines, Arnaud-Soubeyran has been making delicious confections since 1837 in the town of Montélimar. One of their specialties is Arnaud-Soubeyran, Nougat de Montélimar ($12.95 at Mon Aimee Chocolat in the Strip District).
Arnaud-Soubeyran uses local honey, Mediterranean almonds and eggs whites gently cooked in a cauldron. The result is a tender, sweet nougat with a creamy texture that just melts in the mouth. Arnaud-Soubeyran’s Nougat de Montélimar are particularly popular in France during the year-end holidays.
For Halloween, try both Pâtes de Fruits d'Auvergne and Nougat de Montélimar with the delicious L’Original Combier, Liqueur d’Orange, France ($32.99, PLCB No. 7712). In 1834, Jean-Baptiste Combier, a Burgundy native, came to Saumur in the Loire Valley for its acclaimed mild climate. He married and set up a confectionery shop in the center of town.
To enhance his chocolates, Combier experimented with adding orange essence, a tantalizing and exotic flavor at the time. He eventually hatched the idea of using dried orange peels imported from France's colony of Haiti. Combier macerated the peels in natural beet-sugar alcohol before using his single-pot still to distill the orange essence as a candy ingredient.
After much trial and error, Combier perfected a recipe involving not one or two, but three distillations, and thus was born “triple sec.” To reduce the fiery spirit from 90% alcohol by volume to 40%, Combier added water. Additional simple syrup brought mild sweetness to balance the orange peels' natural bitterness.
The orange liqueur became so popular that Combier bottled it separately for sale. He continued refining the process and developing savoir-faire to produce the highest quality liqueur. By 1848, Combier had closed the chocolate shop and was focused wholly on producing the liqueur d'orange. Production increased to meet demand, so in 1850 he hired a then relatively obscure engineer, Gustave Eiffel, who designed a larger room near the original confectionery shop to hold copper alembic stills.
Eiffel, of course, went on to design the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 Paris Exposition. But his elegant, albeit lesser known, design for Combier's distillery remains in use today.
Today, the modern firm Combier produces L'Original Combier, Liqueur d'Orange using only natural ingredients in the same labor-intensive, artisanal method charted by the founder.
Artisan chocolate and liqueur
No Halloween celebration is complete without chocolate, of course. And in Morningside, Pittsburgh is lucky to have a world-class artisan chocolatier in Shelby Gibson at LUX Artisan Chocolates.
She started her culinary career at the Art institute of Pittsburgh in 2003. Gibson then served as a pastry chef at Eleven Restaurant, part of the big Burrito Group. She learned the art of flavor combinations and the importance of making everything from scratch when possible.
Eventually, Gibson rose to executive pastry chef at Eleven, before resigning to found LUX Artisan Chocolates in 2013. Gibson continues making fine chocolates by using the artisanal practices of making everything by hand, in small batches, using neither preservatives nor artificial flavors.
Try LUX Artisan Chocolates, Brown Butter & Cocoa Nibs, 64% Dark Chocolate ($13.95, available online at luxartisanchocolates.com or at Mon Aimee Chocolat). The combination of not too sweet dark chocolate with crunchy cocoa nibs and brown sugar creates a delectable confection that pairs perfectly with the MLH Distillery, Coffee Liqueur ($35 at Pennsylvania Libations in the Strip District, or online at mlhdistillery.com).
This tasty liqueur comes from a cold brewed infusion of traditional Italian and French roast coffees from Grove City’s George Howe Co. The concentrated, richly flavored brewed coffee then is blended with pure spirits and just a touch of sugar to create an enticingly aromatic liqueur with robust coffee flavors and a clean, fresh finish.
Cheers and Happy Halloween!
Dave DeSimone (daveswinecellar.com), a Pittsburgh-based freelancer, is a certified French Wine Scholar who has been writing about wine, food and travel for more than 30 years.