Knafeh is old. The earliest known recipe for a knafeh-style pastry is in a 13th-century Baghdad cookbook, and Nablus, in Palestine, is famous for it: fine shredded pastry, butter and syrup, baked until crisp.
In 2021, Sarah Hamouda, a British-Egyptian engineer living in Dubai, was pregnant and craving knafeh. Her shop, Fix Dessert Chocolatier, put the craving inside a chocolate bar: pistachio cream and toasted kataifi under chocolate. (Some accounts also credit chef Nouel Catis Omamalin with the recipe.) In December 2023, one video of a bar breaking open went viral, and “Dubai chocolate” was everywhere.
The world ran short of pistachios soon after, and prices rose by roughly a third. We took the idea somewhere new: a matcha and ube cookie, with a Dubai-style pistachio and kataifi centre, and pistachio pearls on top.
“the craving went viral. the pastry is eight centuries old.”
The filling is made the day before, the dough rests overnight, and every cookie is filled and closed by hand. Then it's baked the morning you pick it up. No preservatives, because it was never meant to sit on a shelf.