At Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants in New York, the crowning glory of the pastry kitchen was the bon bon trolley.

A thing of beauty, the bon bon trolley chinkled its way around the room, laced in gilt silver, holding seven Waterford crystal jars, tiers of delicate chocolates and hand-wrapped candies, whisked to each table for guests to devour as they sipped their after-dinner beverages.

We’d landed in New York two days before the soft opening of The London and Maze restaurants, where I was to be the executive pastry chef, and Teena sous chef. We were in a right tizz. My visa had been endlessly delayed, we had nowhere to live, and the pressure to perform was intense.

The opening of a restaurant involves months of planning, and we’d arrived to find everything in a clutter. We toured our yet-to-be-finished production kitchen to find stockpots boiling away and no air conditioning. Pastry-making was virtually impossible; the chocolate-tempering machine was tiny and more suited to the home cook than the demands of a large two-restaurant pastry kitchen.

Hastily we dug deep into our backlog of recipes and started churning out chocolates and confections as fast as we could to fill that magnificent bon bon trolley, even tempering chocolate in the champagne fridge to find a cool place to work, and storing our treasures in the vault-like wine store. Teena got a handle on the pastry-production kitchen, and fine-quality delights began to emerge.

For all the splendid beauties that bon bon trolley held, we went with the classics, trying to relive the childhood days of walking into the local candy bar to watch elderly ladies scoop delicious morsels from imposing jars.

A few months later, The New Yorker voted our bon bon trolley the best in New York! But we were not allowed to rejoice, not in public at least — pastry is the poor cousin to the chefs, so if they’re getting slammed (and there was a bit of that), you do not celebrate.

But dance we did, in the kitchen’s commercial walk-in fridge — our secret place to retreat and curse or celebrate without raising the ire of the crack squad.

Here are some of our bon bon trolley favourites from our days in New York…these are the candy bar treats that have made it into our shop. We love them for the fond memories they bring, of having made these in big cities, and of being a kid again.