We work with the seasons. We have a crew of everyday chocolates we always have in stock no matter the time of year, but we have dozens more that come into rotation when their ingredients are in season. In addition to all these flavors, we have MANY flavors we’ve made over the years we no longer make for various reasons. Wanting a place to memorialize these short-run sweets, we made this page. Click on each image to read more about it.
LIFE SPAN:
2010 - 2019
DESCRIPTION:
A simile of a caramel, like or as a croissant but also like or as not? Ground up croissants, mixed into caramel, in a croissant shape.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
I miss it a lot but we’re trying not to use gluten in our space now.
LIFE SPAN:
2010 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
Whitecliff wine + juniper berries + rich chocolate ganache. A beautiful wintery bonbon, fragrant and luxurious.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Highly perishable.
LIFE SPAN:
2007 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
A tasty mounds-like confection that fit in a fiddly box so ridiculously fiddly that even though we had *thousands* of them printed up, we eventually gave them to farmers to use as compost because they were super eco but totally unworkable. Sigh.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
The coconut filling;s shelf life is sadly too short.
LIFE SPAN:
2011 & 2016
DESCRIPTION:
A white chocolate ganache infused with saffron, with wild lime powder, set into a dark chocolate shell.
Originally I made these in 2011, working alone at the brand new shop on North Front Street before it was open to the public. It was the first new chocolate made in the space. Circa 2016 Alexis made these into a much-improved piece.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
The inventor of this savory sweet is no longer a chocolatier with us.
LIFE SPAN:
2011
DESCRIPTION:
Peppermint filled little frog shaped chocolates.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
J.K. Rowling.
LIFE SPAN:
2011 - 2014
DESCRIPTION:
Solid chocolate with toffee scraps.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
This chocolate relied on matzo toffee scraps for its existence, so it fell out of season quickly, and was a sticky pain to make!
LIFE SPAN:
2007 - 2010
DESCRIPTION:
I think these were just pure orange oil mixed with chocolate while it was tempering. What a weird thing.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
They tasted nice but the temper was never good.
LIFE SPAN:
2011
DESCRIPTION:
A solid bunny studded with pistachio praline. Very nice!
CAUSE OF DEATH:
We no longer make the praline.
LIFE SPAN:
2012
DESCRIPTION:
A giant 8” hollow heart stuffed with chocolates. A huge hellish pain to make, we only made it in 2012. It was beautiful.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Lots of them broke in the mail. Probably most of them. Almost all of them.
LIFE SPAN:
2012
DESCRIPTION:
Just like strawberries and cream, but with weird freeze dried peaches that always got too soft and kinda discolored.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
We had to focus our efforts a bit and stuck with the strawberry bark, axing the peaches.
LIFE SPAN:
2013 - 2016
DESCRIPTION:
We used to make a lot of pâté de fruit, fresh local fruit cooked with sugar until a paste forms, then put into a mold and chilled, then tossed with sugar.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Extreme labor intensiveness and maybe not being amazing? Is pâté de fruit the best representation of a fresh local fruit? You need to add so much sugar to make the gel that the flavor of the fruit gets lost so easily.
LIFE SPAN:
2011 - 2014
DESCRIPTIONS:
I was obsessed with making terrible (but very tasty) candy canes. Sugar work is not our wheelhouse and December is our busiest month of the year, so in time I had to stop hijacking our productivity by spending hours pulling sugar for canes that would get soft and flat in a few hours.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Too much work, too hard to preserve without getting too sticky.
LIFE SPAN:
2012
DESCRIPTION:
From a small organic farm in CA, slowly dried so they were still a little chewy, and dipped in dark chocolate. It was really nice to have an orange confection with good oranges that wasn’t candied, just dried. Gosh we should really bring these back.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
These are really meant to be a fleeting moment: dried fruit, catch it while you can.
LIFE SPAN:
2012
DESCRIPTION:
Made with cantaloupes from Taliaferro Farm right down the street from us. Covered in chocolate or plain. The plain was shockingly wonderful. It had a shelf life of one day.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Too labor intensive and highly perishable.
LIFE SPAN:
2013-2015
DESCRIPTION:
We made a fondant-based French Cream kinda thing. They were impossible to make. My mouth is watering thinking about them. We made citrus creamy sugar filling, piped them on top of chocolate discs, and then enrobed them. Beautiful and tart!
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Very difficult to execute them well.
LIFE SPAN:
2012
DESCRIPTION:
A vintage version of our thyme lemon sea salt caramel with a candied lilac garnish.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Candying lilac blossoms is the most labor intensive thing I’ve ever done, and I say that as someone who once cooked a foraged dinner for 40 people where every course was made of food found during a cicada invasion and heat wave.
LIFE SPAN:
2014
DESCRIPTION:
Made with foraged herbs, truly good for a sore throat. The recipe’s in the cookbook!!
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Not enough people want to buy locally made cough drops, I suppose? Also they’re hard to prevent from getting really sticky.
LIFE SPAN:
2012 - 2017
DESCRIPTION:
This baby celebrated my second home of Hawai'i, where macadamia nuts and vanilla beans perfume the air.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
I used to date a boy whose father lived in Hawai’i. This bonbon was my love letter to Kaua’i, where we would go every winter to relax and explore. We’d buy macadamia nuts for this chocolate and visit vanilla farms and chocolate plantations. Kaua’i means so much to me, but I’m not with the boy anymore and I feel increasingly weird about being a tourist in such a heavily trafficked, sacred area that has been so overrun. Sigh. This was a very good piece.
LIFE SPAN:
2013
DESCRIPTION:
For a Mad Men-themed dinner in 2013, we made candy cigarettes for all the diners. Then wrote their names on them.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
These were just for the dinner -- so labor intensive!! But I still have a whole pack of the dang edible wafer paper, man.
LIFE SPAN:
2013
DESCRIPTION:
In 2013 for a moment I made Olive Oil Mendiants: candied olives set into dark chocolate with olive oil caviar (it was the height of molecular gastronomy, give me a break) and big flaky black volcanic sea salt.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Too labor intensive.
LIFE SPAN:
June 2014
DESCRIPTION:
This was a one-off Chocolate of the Month Box, it was so nice and late springy.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
I hand-peeled the fresh shelling peas for the sweet pea green tea bonbons, which, along with its short shelf life, relegated it to special occasion-only status. It was a really delightful white chocolate ganache bonbon with the pea purée and matcha. We still sometimes make the rhubarb caramels in the springtime!
LIFE SPAN:
summer 2015
DESCRIPTION:
Oooof these were so pretty and nice. I did a vegetable-themed dinner (no, they all aren’t) and even the desserts were made from vegetables. I thinly sliced summer squash and candied it in a thick syrup for hours, then rolled it up to look like roses.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Extremely labor intensiveness.
LIFE SPAN:
2010-2015
DESCRIPTION:
We made these to practice cocoa butter painting. Very beautiful solid chocolate hand-painted with eco-colorings. When we first started making these the nontoxic food colorings available for chocolate were awful. Now they’re amazing, but now these are too labor intensive for us to make regularly.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Too labor intensive
LIFE SPAN:
2014
DESCRIPTION:
Lemon oil infused into homemade marshmallows, piped into bunnies.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Have you ever tried to make homemade vegan marshmallows and then pipe it into a bunny mold? Delicious, but not worth the fuss.
LIFE SPAN:
2015
DESCRIPTION:
I decided the cardamom caramel was boring and foraged sumac would make it better. No one agreed. We only made this one once or twice, mostly because infusing sumac into caramel is not fun or easy.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
This bowed out in favor of the classic cardamom caramel.
LIFE SPAN:
2014
DESCRIPTION:
Delightful layers of corn caramel and white chocolate infused with freeze dried corn and honeycomb (the confection, not the thing) chunks.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
A lifetime in hell to produce for so many reasons. the best bar ever, the most difficult to cut up and enrobe.
LIFE SPAN:
2013-2017
DESCRIPTION:
Marshmallows from our friend Sara and Sweet & Sara we’d toast with a blowtorch, homemade graham crackers, enrobed in dark chocolate. They were as big as staplers.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
These were so enormous that we had to use two bar wrappers to cover them when packaging. These were a million-step process that we never even costed out. People loved to eat them, it was a pain to make them.
LIFE SPAN:
2014
DESCRIPTION:
I ground up deeply toasted homemade sourdough boules and made a chocolate dough with them, then paired each with a fruity pâte de fruit. My mom liked burnt toast so I made these odd and very savory bonbons for her.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
A momentary box of sentiment! We garnished the bread bonbons with little cut up dried peaches to simulate butter squares. Too precious to endure.
LIFE SPAN:
2014 - 2016
DESCRIPTION:
Beet white chocolate caramel and pistachio caramel. A very good bar, why don’t we make it!! Related: beet bonbons.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Limited edition for chocolate of the month.
LIFE SPAN:
2013
DESCRIPTION:
Made with carrots, acorn, chestnut, and a little ganache. Not sweet!
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Reinvented into the autumn bonbons.
LIFE SPAN:
2012-2017
DESCRIPTION:
I made these for years even though they were not good sellers. I still want to make them! This one had a chocolate cup, cranberry cream with juniper syrup, juniper-infused chocolate, and fresh juniper berries. (Someone wrote a comment on the photo of this one that says, "At least it's pretty...not sure about so much juniper flavor.” The me of 5 years later agrees. The cream cups were a great way to use up little bits of chocolates. maybe we should make them at Commissary, without so much juniper.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
Highly perishable.
Ginger / Ginger Orange Flower Water
LIFE SPAN:
2005 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
Originally just ginger. This was considered very strange for the time period (around 2005-2015ish), then it became fashionable to include more savory elements in desserts and the truffle seemed tame, so we added orange flower water.
Pomegranate
LIFE SPAN:
2003 -2015
DESCRIPTION:
Such a good truffle! Just beautiful and so tasty. Pomegranate syrup + ganache, garnished with a dried rose petal.
Plain truffles
LIFE SPAN:
2003 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
Chocolate ganache rolled in cocoa powder. The classic. A perfect confection, with a shelf life of just a few days. You’ll see lots of companies making “truffles” that last weeks, months, or years, but those are filled with crap.
Kahlua
LIFE SPAN:
2003 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
Boozy coffee vibes + ganache, garnished with a coffee bean. I wrote to Kahlua to make sure it’s vegan. I know how vegans are. It’s such a syrupy alcohol that it makes a beautiful truffle just combined with ganache.
Port Walnut
LIFE SPAN:
2003 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
An in-house port wine reduction + walnut extract. Nutty and a little tannic and boozy. We’ve also made this with nocino (green walnut liqueur) instead of port and it tasted wildly Christmassy. Still wonderful.
Double Chocolate
LIFE SPAN:
2003 -2015
DESCRIPTION:
A classic chocolate truffle dipped in chocolate, and then rolled in chopped chocolate pieces. So really? Triple chocolate. :) Everybody loved this one.
Coconut Rum
LIFE SPAN:
2003 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
Coconut and rum, made you feel like you were on a tropical vacation. This flavor pairing always felt a little insipid to me, an expected combination that I had no personal connection to. Since then, I’ve tried to work with ingredients that feel more personal or have more of a connection to a place, feeling, or time.
Fennel Apple
LIFE SPAN:
2003 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
Local apple liqueur and a hint of fennel seeds folded into soft ganache, dipped in bittersweet chocolate, rolled in pulverized local Pink Lady apple peel, and dusted with fennel pollen. Truly spectacular, so beautiful, a true taste of upstate New York in a tiny bite.
Raspberry Balsamic
LIFE SPAN:
2003 -2015
DESCRIPTION:
Fresh local raspberries and balsamic reduction folded into ganache. We used to make these with red raspberries grown by Bart Colucci from Meadowview Farm. He’d pick them in the morning and I’d come right over and get them and make the truffles later that day -- ripe raspberries will be moldy by nighttime if you don’t use them, and Bart always picked his very ripe. When Bart died (he was in his 80s, still farming every day), I felt too sad to make this truffle, his truffle.
Lemon with homegrown violet garnish
LIFE SPAN:
2003 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
Ganache with Boyajian lemon oil (no exceptions!), garnished with a painstakingly candied homegrown violet. Maresa (one of my first employees, now my business partner in our joint shop in NYC) and I went on a whole journey with candying flowers, and this truffle exemplified the ridiculous lengths we would go to for prettiness. Most candied flowers use eggwhite to make the sugar stick to the flower, and we experimented with all kinds of swaps. We lost months of our lives to brushing various mixtures onto homegrown flowers with tiny paint brushes — have you ever candied an individual lilac flower? Don’t do it. These truffles should have cost $10 each ha ha.
Ginger Orange Blossom
LIFE SPAN:
2003 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
Ginger extract + orange blossom water + chocolate ganache. Garnished with a sliver of crystallized ginger! I don’t love this truffle but I remember the first time Maresa tasted it she closed her eyes and was so in love.
Coconut
LIFE SPAN:
2003 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
Coconut ganache, rolled in coconut flakes. A real crowd pleaser.
White chocolate yuzu truffles,
LIFE SPAN:
January 2011
DESCRIPTION:
This was one of my first forays into white chocolate. Read more about it here: https://lagustasluscious.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/january-2011-chocolate-of-the-month-white-chocolate-yuzu-truffles/
Mint matcha creams
LIFE SPAN:
March 2011
DESCRIPTION:
I really miss this little sucker. Now we make this flavor combination in milkshake form every March at the cafe, a Mint Matcha Milkshake. Nothing ever dies, it just changes form. More words about this one here, in this blog post from 10 years ago: https://lagustasluscious.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/march-2011-chocolate-of-the-month-mint-matcha-creams/
Blueberry black pepper black currant truffles with jasmine flower garnish:
LIFE SPAN:
June 2012
DESCRIPTION:
Ugh I loved this one, loved photographing its plump fruitiness, all jammy and summery. Super fruity, with a small kick of black pepper, dipped onto a bed of blueberry powder. The bed of blueberry power was always getting too humid and clumping up, but when you got it right it looked so pretty.
CAUSE OF DEATH FOR ALL TRUFFLES:
Too labor-intensive and highly perishable! Most of the recipes are in my cookbook, Sweet and Salty!
Pumpkin Seed Oil Truffles
LIFE SPAN:
2010
DESCRIPTION:
With local Long Island pumpkin seed oil. Really tasty and savory.
Tomato Truffles with tomato skin garnish, and Peach Tarragon bonbons.
LIFE SPAN:
2012
DESCRIPTION:
Yes, those are truffle cups with tomatoes on them. I got them in Japan when I sold merch for Bright Eyes. WHO WAS I??? I can’t remember what was inside this truffle. Sun-dried tomatoes? tomato jam? No clue. But I remember peeling tomatoes and dehydrating and powdering the skin for a pretty garnish. I love that method of garnishing: metonym—a small piece of something standing in for the whole.
Tomato-Lemongrass Truffles with a little shichimi togarashi garnish
LIFE SPAN:
2012
DESCRIPTION:
The year of tomato truffles. Again, I remember nothing about this truffle except that I bought the shichimi togarashi and was just developing a love for it. Now we make this beautiful spicy/citrusy condiment at the cafe and it’s so so so good.
Corn-basil Truffles
LIFE SPAN:
2015
DESCRIPTION:
I infused coconut milk with basil and made ganache with it, then rolled the truffles into corn powder. The joy of vegetable and fruit powders as confection garnishes continues.
White Chocolate Celery Truffles
LIFE SPAN:
2015
DESCRIPTION:
These were made almost entirely to prove to celery-haters that celery is good, and also because Pete Taliaferro grew some wild, mega bitter celery that year. The celery-haters on staff were not converted, but the celery-lovers rejoiced. We dipped them in white chocolate swirled with green, a true tie-dye beauty.
Sour Sorrel Caramels with candied asparagus
LIFE SPAN:
2013
DESCRIPTION:
This year Pete Taliaferro had a lot of sorrel growing, a leafy sour green, and asked if we could do anything with it. our version of a sour patch kid, was the result, with a little citric acid kicked in. very green and lemon-y. I mandolined asparagus and candied it in diamond shapes for the garnish. Ridiculous. a very good candy!
Chipotle Caramelized Onion
LIFE SPAN:
2012 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
Caramelized onion + chipotle powder in ganache. Rich, savory, spicy, a general win all around. we turned this one into a caramel, so we wouldn’t have to say goodbye to such a perfect flavor profile.
Beet Coriander
LIFE SPAN:
2003 - 2015
DESCRIPTION:
Best best best, local beets dried and ground up into a powder and cracked coriander.
Olive Oil Truffles
LIFE SPAN:
May 2011.
DESCRIPTION:
Cilantro truffles? Corn truffles? Tomato cumin? You bet. Weird, divisive, incredible. Olive oil ganache is maybe the best ganache, truly.
CAUSE OF DEATH FOR ALL TRUFFLES:
Too labor-intensive with high perishability.