Truffles are my mother’s favorite chocolate. When I was a kid, I honestly did not know that places like See’s or Fannie May or Godiva even made other confections—I didn’t even know there were different kinds of truffles. It was all chocolate on chocolate, all the time.

My dad would buy my mom a box of truffles for her birthday in March, and she would hoard them and eat them like little hunks of chocolate gold. Left to herself, she would have stretched those suckers out into June. But she had me sneaking them when I thought I could get away with it, and my dad swiping them more often than that, so generally they only lasted about a month.

As I got older, I branched out. Buttercreams, caramels, brittles—just no fruit, no nuts, and no coconut. And that included truffles. My mother was also not a nut person, which is kind of weird when you consider that most chocolatiers put ground nuts on top of truffles. She was so happy when See’s started selling dark chocolate truffles with no nuts on top—and my dad remembered to buy that variety.

I made a brief foray into making truffles at home, but it took time and energy I didn’t have for a result that wasn’t as good as what I could buy.

When my dad died, I took over the candy orders, and I kept pushing my mom to give other flavors a shot. Every year we have a good laugh at the idea of her allowing pineapple truffles, apple pie truffles, or strawberry truffles in her house. She did deign to eat a few mint truffles at Christmas. The ones I miss are the malted truffles that See’s used to make. Those were great.

So now my mom and I exchange truffles at Christmas and make them last til our birthdays in March. At that point, we are pretty much truffled out for the year, and we start all over again the following December.