Sweeties Candy Cottage sells Dubai chocolate hearts

Lisa Hodes stays on top of trends at Sweeties Candy Cottage, the Huntington shop she has owned since 2005. She pioneered chocolate pizza, chocolate fidget spinners and chocolate turkey dinners, led the way with smash cakes (and burn-away smash cakes), went hard on candy sushi. But she’s never seen anything fly out of the store like Dubai chocolate bars.

Invented in 2021 by the Dubai chocolatier Fix Dessert (who called it Can’t Get Knafeh of it), the bar went viral on social media last year. Hodes first saw it on TikTok last summer but worried about the pricing. Sweeties has always been an affordable sort of "specialty retailer," and she didn’t want to alienate her customers with a product that was too "high end." She also wondered if producing the bar would be "too much of an undertaking."

But Sweeties’ head chocolatier, Aniko Haworth, was intrigued. On her own time (and for her own Facebook-based confectioner, Sweets and Treats by Aniko) she made a dozen bars and posted a photo on a Deer Park page. "I was sold out in an hour," she recalled. "The next day, I told Lisa we should do it."

It turned out that producing Sweeties’ Dubai Pistachio Kunafa chocolate bars was indeed an undertaking: Kadayif, phyllo dough shredded into thin threads, is toasted in butter then blended with pistachio cream and a hint of tahini (sesame paste). The filling mixture is spooned into bar molds lined with chocolate and spread, carefully, just to the edges — but not over the edges. Too little filling and the bars will buckle, too much and they’ll bulge. Melted chocolate is poured over the filling and evened with a spatula. Once cool, the bars are unmolded. Unsightly bumps are filed away, unsightly leaks are patched.

In July, Sweeties started selling the bars at the store and online in its Etsy shop. "It absolutely blew up," Hodes said. "Soon we were filling 2-300 orders a week, and many of them were for multiple bars. People were coming from all over the Island and I was shipping to France, to Hungary, Australia, Guam." This being the summer, the chocolate needed to be boxed with cooler packs. "I posted all the caveats — but still got complaints."

Business has leveled off for the bars but, in late January, Sweeties started selling Dubai Pistachio Kunafa chocolate hearts, which are starting to pick up steam as Valentine's Day approaches. The hearts are plumper than the bars, and thus have a higher filling-to-chocolate ratio.

The standard Dubai bars and hearts are made with milk chocolate but, occasionally, Haworth will make a batch with dark chocolate. The 2.17-ounce bars are $12, 1.92-ounce hearts are $8.50. Sweeties always tries to have stock on hand but it’s safest to call first.

Sweeties Candy Cottage, 142 E. Main St., Huntington, 631-423-7625, sweetiescandycottage.com. Open Monday and Tuesday 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Wednesday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday noon to 5 p.m.