A Guide to Lebanese Sweets: Baklava, Maamoul, Kenefe and More

Walk up to a Lebanese sweets counter and you will meet a dozen things at once, most of them beige, most of them nut-filled, and almost none of them labelled in a way that helps. This is the guide we wish someone had handed us.

It is arranged by what the thing actually is, not by how it is spelled — because nearly every word here is a transliteration from Arabic and every one of them has three or four accepted spellings.

Baklava

Layers of paper-thin phyllo pastry, brushed with butter, packed with chopped pistachio or walnut, baked, and soaked in sugar syrup or honey. Cut into diamonds, squares or fingers.

The Lebanese version is generally less sweet and less drenched than the Greek or Turkish, and more likely to be built on pistachio than walnut. It is a celebration food, an offering to guests, and the thing most people already recognise. Our Baklava With Pistachio takes the filling and the layered pastry and wrap them in chocolate, which sounds like heresy and behaves very well.

Maamoul (also mamoul, ma'amoul)

A buttery semolina or flour shortbread, moulded in a carved wooden press, filled with pistachio, walnut or date paste. Dense, crumbly, and only lightly sweet.

Maamoul is the Eid cookie. It is also made for Easter and Christmas by Levantine Christians, and the shape often tells you the filling: round for pistachio, flattened for date, domed for walnut. Families bake it in enormous batches and the pressing is a group activity. Our Mamoul (Dark) enrobes the whole cookie in chocolate.

Kenefe (knafeh, kunafa, kanafeh)

Hair-thin strands of wheat pastry called kataifi, toasted in butter until amber, layered over soft white cheese or clotted cream, baked, and doused in syrup while hot.

Eaten hot, often for breakfast, frequently stuffed into a sesame bread roll and eaten in the street. This is the pastry the world recently met through the Dubai chocolate bar — but it has been a Levantine breakfast for centuries. See our Kenefe and Kenefe Caramel Biscuit (Dark).

Halawa (halva, halvah)

A dense, crumbly confection of ground sesame paste — tahini — bound with sugar, often studded with pistachio. Faintly savoury and much less sweet than it looks.

Halawa is an everyday food rather than a celebration one: eaten with bread for breakfast, cut from a block at the shop. If you have only had the vacuum-packed supermarket version, the fresh article is a different thing entirely. Try our Halawa Pistachio.

Malban (Lebanese fruit jelly)

A chewy fruit-based confection, often apricot or grape, frequently rolled around whole pistachios or walnuts and cut into rounds or logs. Related to lokum but generally fruitier and less floral.

Malban is the sweet that turns up in the bowl on the coffee table. The fruit-leather Apricot Moon sits in this family, and more malban is on the way.

Nougat and nougat madlouka

Chewy nougat, whipped with honey or sugar syrup, studded with pistachio, almond, cashew or walnut. Madlouka is the creamier variant, usually layered with semolina cream and a cookie crumble.

Softer and stickier than the French torrone tradition. See Madlouka and our Apricot Pistachio Nougat.

Basma

A sweetened semolina pastry, flaky and delicate, less syrup-heavy than baklava. Quieter than most things on this list and often overlooked. Our Basma is one of the counter's genuine sleepers.

Moghli

Not a pastry at all — a spiced rice pudding made with caraway, cinnamon and anise, topped with coconut and nuts. Traditionally made to celebrate the birth of a baby and served to everyone who visits.

The spice profile is unusual in a sweet and it is the flavour on this list that surprises people most. Our Moghli puts it in chocolate.

Bouza ashta

Ashta is the thick clotted cream of Levantine pastry, often perfumed with orange blossom or rose water. Bouza is ice cream — the Levantine kind, stretchy and mastic-scented. Together they are the flavour of a Beirut summer.

Snayniyeh

A wheat-berry pudding with nuts and spices, made to celebrate a baby's first tooth — see Snayniyeh. There is a whole category of Lebanese sweets that exist to mark a specific moment in a child's life, and this is one of them.

A note on spelling

You will see maamoul, ma'amoul and mamoul; knafeh, kunafa and kenefe; halawa, halva and halvah. None is wrong. Arabic has sounds that do not map cleanly onto the Latin alphabet, and every diaspora community settled on its own convention. We use the Lebanese pronunciations because that is where our chocolates are made.

Where the chocolate comes in

Everything above is a pastry, a paste or a pudding. What we do — with a maker in Beirut who has been at it for decades — is take those flavours and put them into an individually wrapped chocolate that keeps.

It is not a replacement for a plate of hot kenefe. It is a way of having the flavour on a Tuesday, in a shape you can post to someone. Browse the whole set in our Mediterranean Flavors collection, sold by the quarter pound, half pound or pound.