The textured, heavy-paper business card is tasteful: "Dolly Mama, handmade chocolate."

Said chocolate is of the truffle kind, bittersweet and piped full of a creamy white chocolate ganache of almond paste and cognac with a bottom dusting of demerara -- a coarse tropical sugar.

Dolly Marcarelli sold 100 of the above "Pearls of Perigord" to Four Square restaurant for its latest New Year's Eve menu. With that imprimatur of approval, the 39-year-old Odessa, Texas, native got a vendor's spot at the Durham Farmers' Market this spring.

"I've been pleasantly surprised. People have been very responsive to my chocolate," she says of the boxes that range from $8.50 to $16 and are frequently sold out by noon Saturday.

Marcarelli is one of 56 vendors at the farmers' market. As a self-taught chocolatier, she embodies the locally produced offerings at the market as she feels her way toward a business plan to make chocolate a full-time endeavor.

She and her husband, John, an architect working in solar energy, are also typical of recent arrivals attracted by Durham's diversity and the feeling that the once-shabby downtown is taking off.

On a recent Saturday morning, the breeze bounces orange and pink Japanese paper lanterns dangling from the fringe of Marcarelli's white tent. The modest, ribboned cardboard boxes have names like "Sea Turtle Bar," "Heart Box" or "Local Box." The contents range from bar chocolate to molded creations to truffles stuffed with combinations of sea salt, mint, spearmint, ginger, strawberry, lavender, honey, raspberry, orange and coffee.

The boxes might as well be labeled sweat, patience and time to describe the arc she traveled in order to learn her craft.

"What I first started doing bears no resemblance to what I do now," says the 1995 Texas A&M-Galveston marine biology graduate.

The odyssey led her to several restaurants and bars throughout the Southwest. She often worked in the front of the house as a bartender, hostess or waitress but had a penchant for drifting back to the kitchen. Along the way a chef tagged her with the moniker "Dolly Mama."

The first chocolate "ah ha" moment struck in 2003 in Santa Fe, N.M., when she walked into Todos Santos, a shop whose specialty is chocolate encased in gold leaf.

"I realized chocolate could be something special," she recalls. "Inside is wrapped a whole world of mystery, knowledge, a bottomless world."

Meanwhile, she and John were itching to buy a house, which Santa Fe prices didn't permit. An appetite for the beach led to a visit to Wilmington. On the way back to RDU airport, they circled through Durham.

"Real estate [prices] got us here," she says of their Kent Street home. The potential of downtown Durham and the diversity of its people were also factors in the couple's 2005 move here.

Chocolate moment number two was in New York in 2006. Marcarelli was checking out the store of Michel Cluizel, a gold standard in French chocolate, when she saw a cocoa tree sprouting pods of purple, brown, green and yellow.

"It blew my mind," she says. "I sat in the shop and let John and his mom go shopping while I learned about chocolate."

Back in Durham she fired up the double boiler, and with thermometer and books at hand, she began her vexing, grueling and ultimately exhilarating self-education.

"It takes a lot of patience," she says.

She kept running her efforts by Elizabeth Woodhouse and Shane Ingram, who own Four Square where she works. After about a year, they said she was ready and offered her Pearls of Perigord truffles a place on the New Year's Eve menu.

"That was nice, having the chef's confidence in me," she says.

Competing with 15 other vendors to receive a spot at the market was a big step. A Web site is next.

"I don't know exactly what the [business] model is," she says. "I'd love to have a little shop."