Aigner Chocolates has been making all its own treats for the past 93 years. Now it’s in full spring holiday mode, beckoning locals with toffee matzo and three-foot-tall Easter bunnies.
At Aigner Chocolates in Forest Hills, it’s mid-March and I’m eating a chocolate-covered cherry and thinking about my father. When I was a kid in the 1950s, chocolate cherries were a staple of New York’s corner candy stores, and my father and I both loved them — the crisp shell, the fruit inside swimming in sugary liquid — though they were often a little stale, as if they’d sat on the shelf for a while. At this small store, with its ivy-covered awning on Metropolitan Avenue, the maraschino cherries are large and luscious, and the cherry juice is mixed with rum. Like all the other classic sweets displayed in one of the shop’s glass-fronted cases — among them salted caramels, mocha truffles, almond clusters and butter crunch — they are made on-site in the basement kitchen. In fact, all the chocolates are made in-house, just as they’ve been since the store, one of the oldest sweets shops in New York, first opened 93 years ago. chocolate enrobing machine
In other display cases you’ll find elegantly packaged peppermint patties, crunchier and more toothsome than any I’ve ever had; chocolate cordials filled with amaretto or Grand Marnier; and rainbow-colored fruit slices, more pâte de fruit than Chuckles. A small freezer at the back of the room holds pints of homemade ice cream. Light streams through the windows onto a marble ledge where you can sip an espresso drawn from the gleaming machine in a corner. A long glass-topped table runs down the middle of the room; on it are lollipops including ones resembling white rabbits with psychedelic pink ears.
Rachel Kellner, 37, who owns the store with her husband, Mark Libertini, 50, gives me a sample of the macaroons that they offer for Passover, the coconut mound covered in dark chocolate, big as a plum and very rich. Kellner, who is Jewish and grew up in New Jersey, tells me about their homemade dessert matzos too, dipped in toffee or coated in chocolate and dusted with crushed almonds. They’re sold alongside a nonsectarian array of other holiday sweets: Easter eggs, Star of David lollipops, chocolate Seder plates and plaques etched with drawings of the Last Supper.
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