Within 21 years living in the UAE one thing I have never really found to my fancy is Arabian sweets – I have to admit it.

Yes, I did taste many, and although they were certainly delicious and of wonderful variety, I always found the intensity of the sweetness to be over-powering – and I could never enjoy more than a nibble, and never went in for a second.

However, this has changed, and thanks to the discovery of homemade Arabian sweets!

I can’t believe it took so long to find them!

Why are they kept secret???

And it is my pleasure to introduce you to La Nadno Sweets, a petite family business – so delicious were their sweets, that friends and guests kept telling them they should share them with the world! And that is what they have started doing, with delivery to Al Ain and Abu Dhabi.

This is what arrived on my doorstep:

So professionally presented, I wasn’t sure if these were homemade or store-bought – also, each portion was perfectly shaped and sized.

I thought that if these really were made at home, surely they were the result of someone blessed with incredible patience, and outstanding care and attention to detail. If it were me, each one would be a little squashed on this side, a bit crooked on the other, etc.!

But at first taste it became clear that these Arabian sweets were definitely and totally different from commercial ones – they tasted fantastic!

Very light on the palate, the pastry just melting directly on the tongue – not too sweet, or perhaps just a different, natural sweetener was used, not like the shop ones. Smooth, and others crunchy, the textures were excellent, as if the oven temperatures and duration were exactly right. And they just felt like a higher quality, perhaps the ingredients were purer, or more carefully selected?

Knowing the business nature of commercial bakeries, I also suppose the difference is in not applying cost-cutting measures – because when your overall objective is profit driven, then passing to a lower-grade butter, for instance, shaves a few dirham per batch, and that adds up over time and improves the competitiveness, making sure the price stays low, and the quality just enough to sell, but not enough to really wow.

La Nadno Sweets, with whatever magic they use in their home bakery, really did WOW!!!

Observe the perfection in the detail – very impressive.

I’ll add another reason I believe makes the difference, and this is just a guess, as I’m not affiliated in any way with La Nadno – I think that if you are employed to throw flour into machines and bake sweets all day every day, you might not have the full passion and the deep-hearted motivation to make sweets with love.

I don’t mean to push down the expertise of professional bakers – I respect their work highly: I’m just saying that it’s different when you do it in your own kitchen, with pride representing your family traditions, in small hand-made batches… yes, with the love of a Mother.

And that is what I think I tasted with these amazing sweets – homemade with love.

Try it for yourselves, and let me know if you feel the same.

Just look at these marvels, so beautiful to also present them as gifts:

And so I am grateful to La Nadno Sweets, for opening my eyes, and my tastebuds, to Arabian sweets of family tradition – maybe this was no secret and I’m the only one who didn’t know!

But as an international resident, I don’t have an Arabian family who can bake the real homemade sweets for me, and so all I know is what I’ve experienced from buying in sweet sections of supermarkets and bakeries – and so I feel very happy and fortunate to have tasted real Arabian sweets for the first time: thank you, La Nadno Sweets!