Quick, if someone mentions bon bons, what do you picture? Chocolates or hard candies?
I always thought bon bons were fancy chocolates. I only recently saw it on a tin of hard candies.
Chocolate. Like a Whitmans sampler.
Definitely chocolates. I think it’s a law or something… 
Oooh! Chocolate covered cherries.
I think of those bite sized, chocolate covered balls of ice cream you used to be able to get at the movies.
Neither- they’re a chewy sweet covered in flavoured powdered sugar this side of the pond.
Apparently what I recall as bon bons are more specifically known as Vienna Fruit Bon bons which are hard candy with a sweet syrup centre. Fruit flavours, nothing chocolatety.
For some reason, when I think of bon bons, I think of chocolate-covered balls of coconut. It’s part of the reason I’ve never been interested in them.
Oh, man, I forgot about those. My grandfather used to always have those around his place in a candy bowl when we visited (he was from Poland, and those are or at least were popular candies in Poland.)
As for me, I think of the chocolate ball as bon bons.
Bon bons are filled chocolates taken from a frilly box and savored one by one by a plumpish kept woman in a negligee, propped up in her lavish double bed, whilst reading a movie magazine.
I thought “chewy sweets covered in flavoured powdered sugar” was Turkish Delight. That’s what I learned from C.S. Lewis, anyway.
A box of chocolates like Russell Stover or Whitman, although I don’t know anyone that actually calls them bonbons.
Whatever it was that Peggy Bundy was always eating. It always appeared to be chocolate.
I don’t recall them at movies but we’d sometimes have those at home when I was a kid. They were packaged in cardboard canister, like a small hat box.
To the best of my knowledge and some experience, they are chocolate covered confections. Ferrero Rocher are basically bonbons I thought.
I definitely don’t think of hard candies. The image that came up was of light-coloured chewable confections, like nougat or pralines or marzipan or something.
Turkish Delight has more of a jelly texture and are square, with a light sugar dusting, bonbons are more like a kind of fruit flavoured toffee in a ball shape, with a thick layer of brightly coloured sugar, like this.
Thank you!
This. Exactly.
I can envision many different sorts of bon-bons, but all of them are things that can be chewed. Hard candies are right out.
I thought they were the things women eat while sitting on the couch all day watching Oprah.