We catch Katherine Duncan on an early morning at the Katherine Anne Confections production kitchen in Irving Park.
"This is kind of the the belly of the beast," she said. "This is where we make everything."
That morning Duncan was working on a cranberry blood orange ganache for her seasonal truffles.
"We melt down all the chocolate and ingredients together, we'll pipe them onto a sheet tray, we'll weigh and roll each one, then we'll dip them in our tempered chocolates," she said.
Everywhere you look, you'll see trays upon trays of truffles and other forms of chocolate.
"We make truffles, caramels, marshmallows, drinking chocolate," she said. "We really focus on doing seasonal, fun, unique combinations of maybe familiar ingredients and unfamiliar combinations."
These include a goat cheese walnut, a raspberry champagne and a lemon poppyseed truffle, along with a rosemary fleur de sel caramel.
Duncan said she learned to make the candies while growing up on a farm in Wisconsin. Her family would use the cream from their cows to make caramels and truffles for the holiday season.
Eventually she started a business selling to locals.
"I moved to Chicago when I was 18 and just kind of kept giving truffles and caramels away as holiday gifts," she said. "And friends and family would just say, 'Oh my gosh, these are so good.'"
And when she was just 22 years old, she officially started Katherine Anne Confections. In 2010, she moved into the business' first location at 2745 W. Armitage and opened for retail in 2012.
"People were so excited," she said. "They showed up. They supported us from the very beginning, but it took a long time to really build up the business, and it took a long time to kind of establish ourselves as high-end makers and purveyors of delicious truffles and caramels."
Now, Katherine Anne Confections is one Chicago's few chocolate connoisseurs.
"I think that the history of the Chicago as the Candy Capital is amazing," she said. "We don't see as much of it these days. So I think, interestingly, we are actually kind of the biggest artisan chocolatier in the city, which is just mind boggling."
Granted, it has become a lot harder to be a chocolatier these days, she said, as chocolate prices have increased significantly.
"Chocolate prices have gone up astronomically with the tariffs as well," she said. "Since January of 2024, our costs have gone up about 95%, so almost doubled."
Duncan said this has inevitably led to conversations about ways to combat this, whether that be decreasing portions or just increasing prices.
"One thing we've never done is used less chocolate in a recipe," she said. "We've never diluted the flavor. We've always made it really, really delicious."
She said this is the case for the decadent drinking chocolates as well.
"Each one of our drinking chocolates has over four ounces of ganache in there that we make with real chocolate," she said. "We're not using lower quality chocolate or cheaper chocolate. I do think that that focus on quality brings a lot of people in the door."
In fact, so many people were coming in that Duncan was able to open the second location in Irving Park in 2023.
She said now the cafes have become third places for the community, from first date spots, to celebration spaces for people expecting their first child, to even the site of an engagement.
"I've seen our cafes become usually standing room only," she said. "I've seen people sit down and share a table with somebody they had never met before, and they strike up a conversation, and they're there for an hour or two, leaving exchanging phone numbers."
She said whether people are frequent customers are stopping in for the first time, the hope is that they find joy and "little moments of bliss" in the candies.
"Like when you have that perfect caramel melts in your mouth, or you bite into one of our layered ganaches that's just oh my gosh, mind blowing," she said. "At the end of the day, our goal is to make people happy."