Before we left New York earlier today, I stopped by Kee's Chocolate in SoHo for the first time. I had heard a lot about Kee's over the past couple years, then a couple friends urged me to check it out earlier in the weekend, so I made sure to swing in before our little NYC excursion was out. The shop was totally empty when we arrived with nothing to look at except the display case holding the truffles. Totally bare walls, nothing on the shelves... Maybe they are in the midst of renovating or something. I wanted to ask, but we had a plane to catch. (We made it, but only just.)

Kee's makes the kind of truffles I love more than any other - the kind that taste the way truffles do when a skilled chocolatier is making truffles at home in preparation for a dinner party for her close friends. Fresh, delicious, and full of love. There is one other chocolatier I've posted about recently that I placed in that category, and that's XOX in San Francisco. Kee's truffles are incredibly soft, so soft that they barely hold their shape and need to be kept cool so they don't get all melty and flatten in the summer air. The taste is big and explosive, deep, rich, and extremely memorable. The ones we tried were hand-rolled with a classic ganache center and a rough coating, one rolled in black and white sesame and the other in chopped, toasted pine nuts. (Note that Kee also does molded and dipped chocolates that sport a smooth tempered chocolate coating, but we didn't try any of those today.) I'm really into the rough coating - on one hand, it's a way to get out of tempering a melted chocolate coating if you don't feel like it, and on the other hand and more importantly, it adds awesome texture and can make the overall experience of the truffle really exciting.

I'm in love with Kee now. Really.