I have always loved chocolate, but it was my first Godiva truffle that spoiled me. Shaped like a shell, the open oyster filled with hazelnut praline dissolved in my mouth in a sense-enhancing glaze. It made me question every chocolate I had previously eaten.

Hedonist Artisan Chocolates, recently relocated to 674 South Avenue, takes this basic idea of chocolate finery and adds its own spin, adding a bit of ginger, clove, cayenne pepper, pomegranate, champagne, and even eggnog for the holidays. That the truffles all look beautiful adds to the feeling of indulgence.

Like any tasting tour, there is a way of unfolding the experience to best present each item's attributes. With chocolates, it is best to partake from the dark to the sweet, as the sweet can easily overwhelm and cancel out the flavors of the dark. I did not follow this rule, as I randomly picked up bits from the more than 10 samples while the owners were waiting on customers. Patience is not one of my virtues, especially when chocolate is sweetly calling my name. Now that I know, I'll remember to begin with the dark to get even more out of my addiction.

There is also a way to taste chocolate that's much more refined than my gobble-them-up method. Let it melt in the mouth, breathing through the nose, and then breathing through the mouth to get the full experience. I found this very challenging to do, especially with the chocolate-covered orange peel, which features peels imported from Italy that taste nothing like the gross, gummy American counterpart.

The delicate, colorful designs on some of the chocolates differentiate the flavors, and are actually cocoa butter on a strip that is transferred onto the chocolates while they're still warm. As each chocolate is hand formed, getting the size and placement to align perfectly with the cocoa butter stencil is an art in itself. The chocolates also need to be uniform in size, and able to stay upright and not tip over in a box. They want each box opened to be perfect, so a chocolate intern's mistakes become our tasting treasures.

To many, artisan chocolates may seem expensive. However, to the chocolate connoisseur, just one heavenly hand-made morsel is worth a case of a king-sized standard.