If you're looking for a special Mother's Day gift, check out Raleigh chocolate maker Reginald Savage's wonderful creamy truffles.

They come in dark and milk chocolates, and you'll want to savor every one of these babies. They are multilayered, and each flavor is distinct and complements the next.

When you bite into the hazelnut butter cream, you taste chocolate first, then the liqueur, next the milk and white chocolate filling and then you finish off with the nuttiness of the hazelnut.

My favorite, the orange truffle, offers a light, refreshing citrusy meringue filling enclosed by dark chocolate. 

The raspberry truffle you smell first, bursting with its berry aroma and then you get the graininess of the raspberry purée making for a scrumptious treat.

Savage puts a lot of hard work into these truffles to make sure it's love at first bite.

"Ideally, you drive people crazy," he says. "You want people to swoon. If you get it, you've done it."

He strives to pull that off every morning. He's awake before 5 a.m. to make a several batches of his truffles daily. "It doesn't sit around on the shelf. I know when I make it, it will sell within three days."

His best-sellers include the assortment, dark chocolate julep and the classic dark chocolate truffles. And lately, the dark chocolate caramel cream with pecan and the milk chocolate caramel cream with pecan was outselling everything else. 

Joyce Fowler, A Southern Season's candy buyer, describes Savage's chocolates as very complex. "It doesn't taste like anyone else's. His fillings are very pure. He seeds the raspberries himself, purées the fruit. It's very fresh. His chocolates are complex like wine with a beginning, middle and finishing taste. The flavors don't jump out in your face," she explains. "Very subtle. It takes a little longer for the flavors to bloom in your mouth. You tend to be more thoughtful when you're eating it."

Savage, a former philosophy professor, named his chocolate company Azurelise for his daughter. He sells his chocolates at A Southern Season in Chapel Hill.  You can also order from his Web site: www.azurelise.com.