Moroccan Desserts & Sweets

How a Moroccan meal really ends

The most common end to a Moroccan meal is disarmingly simple: a plate of fresh seasonal fruit and a pot of sweet mint tea. After a rich tagine or couscous, a bowl of oranges, grapes, melon or pomegranate refreshes the palate, and the tea — sweet, minty and warm — acts as both dessert and digestive. The famous pastries are more a hospitality and celebration food than a nightly dessert (see pastries explained).

A beloved light 'dessert' is the orange-and-cinnamon salad: sliced oranges dusted with cinnamon and sometimes a few drops of orange-blossom water — cooling, fragrant and typical of the way Moroccans like to finish.

Sweet grains: seffa and puddings

When something more substantial is wanted, Morocco turns to sweetened grains and milky puddings.

• Seffa: steamed couscous (or fine vermicelli, seffa medfouna) sweetened with sugar, cinnamon, butter, almonds and raisins, mounded and often served at celebrations — sweet couscous as a dish in its own right.
• Muhallabia / mhalbi: a delicate milk-and-rice-flour pudding scented with orange-blossom water and topped with cinnamon or almonds.
• Riz au lait (rice pudding): creamy rice pudding perfumed with orange-blossom, a home-style comfort dessert.
• Sellou (sfouf): the dense, energy-rich toasted-flour, almond, sesame and honey mixture, especially at Ramadan and celebrations.

Fruit, nuts and simple sweets

Dried and fresh fruit do a lot of the sweet work. Dates — often stuffed with almond paste — figs, apricots and grapes appear on the tea tray and after meals (see the dates guide). Nuts, especially almonds and walnuts, are everywhere. Simple homemade sweets like stuffed dates, honey-dipped briouat and crumbly ghriba cookies bridge the gap between fruit bowl and full pastry spread, and are the kind of thing offered casually with tea.

Celebration sweets

For weddings, religious feasts, Ramadan and honoured guests, the sweet table becomes lavish. Pyramids of almond kaab el ghazal, coiled m'hancha, honey-soaked chebakia, fried briouat and trays of assorted pastries are laid out, alongside sellou and dates, all served with round after round of mint tea. This is where the Moroccan sweet tooth truly shows itself — not as a course at the end of dinner, but as a generous, social ritual of hospitality. The famous savoury-sweet pastilla, dusted with sugar and cinnamon, also belongs to this celebratory register.

Fried, honeyed and shareable

A whole family of sweets lives at the fried-and-honeyed end of the table, made in big batches to share. Chebakia — sesame-coated rosettes fried and steeped in honey and orange-blossom syrup — are the Ramadan flagship, but they belong to celebrations generally. Briouat, little pastry triangles and cigars, are fried and dipped in honey, with an almond-paste filling for the sweet version. Sfenj, the airy Moroccan doughnut, is fried to order at street stalls and eaten warm, plain or sugared, with tea or coffee.

These sweets keep well and travel well, which is exactly why they are made in quantity: a tray of chebakia and briouat can sit out for weeks of guests. Their stickiness and intense sweetness are designed to pair with, and be cut by, glass after glass of hot mint tea (see the mint tea ritual), and they overlap directly with the almond pastries covered in our pastries guide.

Tasting them for yourself

To taste Moroccan sweets at their best, buy almond pastries fresh from a dedicated pâtisserie, try seffa or a milk pudding at a traditional restaurant, and always pair them with mint tea — the combination is the point (see the mint tea ritual). Many cooking classes include a sweet, and a food tour will steer you to good pastries and puddings. For the flavours and pantry behind them, see the ingredients glossary.