Meet the chef who created the viral Dubai chocolate
The creation shot to instant fame thanks to some social media magic – it was unashamedly created for Instagram, with its vivid visual appeal – first locally, then globally. And the craze doesn't show any sign of letting up, even fuelling a global pistachio shortage! According to the , prices have surged from $7.65 to $10.30 a pound in one year. Having prompted a series of 'dupes' around the world – including here in Australia and, reportedly, biggies like Lindt jumping on the trend, it appears everyone wants the unlikely taste of chocolate with pistachio paste, tahini, and the pastry crunch of Middle eastern dessert knafeh through it, no matter what the cost. Explaining that the creation is an ode to the flavours of the region, Catis says, 'I decided to put these flavours together inspired by the idea of nostalgia. It's not a common thing to use in desserts, but I noticed that in Lebanon, people enjoy eating dates and tahini together. The flavours resonated with me personally too. I've been living in the UAE for 16 years, and I enjoy Middle Eastern desserts – especially kunefeh. That's what triggered the thought process of creating something unique.' Catis has since parted ways with the Fix chocolate – who only sell their chocolate through Instagram at fixed times during the day via delivery app Deliveroo, the 'hard to get' strategy adding to the chocolate's allure.
In the meantime, he has opened his own boutique chocolatier, Sna'ap, offering something similar - but taking things to the next level, with a focus on pure, premium ingredients. Named after the sound the chocolate is supposed to make when cracking a bar open, he sells them via Instagram and out of a pop-up chocolate bar on a popular waterfront promenade in Dubai.
'Blending the flavours of the Middle East, with say, the European or Western, and making it relatable to this community, that has always been at the forefront of our creations,' he says. 'My focus is all about showcasing the flavours of the UAE to the world, that has always been my reason for doing this. Not only Emirati flavours, but other flavours too – because we have so many different cultures here in Dubai… we have Indian, Filipino, French, British, so many… 'But our point of difference at Sna'ap is keeping things as pure as possible. You don't want a chocolate with a lot of mystery ingredients in it!' To that end, he has continued to innovate with flavours like strawberry fields (white chocolate infused with freeze dried strawberry), Kadak chai (cardamom flavoured), salted caramel camel chocolate and to mark Ramadan in 2025, ube baklava – a true expression of Dubai's multiculturalism. 'Sna'ap is all about being creative, and also respecting heritage,' he continues. 'But I want this to be more than just a viral chocolate. It has to be something that you crave for every day. You can buy it anytime and you enjoy it as a snack basically. It's a new nostalgia.' Wondering where to buy Dubai chocolate in Australia? Unfortunately, the OG can only be purchased in Dubai, but you can find multiple local versions in stores around Melbourne and Sydney, and online.
Jason Atherton's Dubai Dishes Watch now
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Sydney Morning Herald
2 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Are the ghosts of this convent's ‘fallen women' about to be heard?
Today, the Abbotsford Convent seems like a utopian village. Children somersault on the lawns, artists labour in their studios, the sounds of Australian National Academy of Music performers practising spills out of the windows as the lowing of farm animals drifts in from the Collingwood Children's Farm next door. My memories of the convent are halcyon, comprising visits to the children's farm with my sons for vicarious first sightings of goats, cows and guinea pigs, and coffee-fuelled broadcasts from the 3MBS studios with my chamber music trio, Seraphim, alongside a wall inscribed with messages from friends, colleagues and, cringingly, our former selves. But these are brief, touristic impressions. Writer Nam Le, who occupied an artist's studio here for a decade, remembers: My studio was C2.46, on the second floor of the convent building, in its eastern (unofficial) 'Writer's Wing'. I often worked late – and was there alone after dark, visited only by the Wilson Security team. (It helped that I lived seven minutes' walk away.) During that time I felt intensely connected to the sisters, novices and postulants who had lived there since the mid-1800s. I sensed traces of their lives. And I felt intensely curious about these lives, the situations that had brought them there. After a bit of digging, I found my interest expanding to the history of the convent and the land on which it stands. This is land that is enormously significant to the Kulin Nation, whose connection to it extends back millennia. And it's also significant to the history of Melbourne, and the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony. It's a charged locus of church and state, a dense repository of heritage. And its incarnations over time – including as a convent, Magdalene asylum, farm, laundry, university, and (hard-fought-for) community space – exist simultaneously in that space, and give off compelling, even ghostly, energies. Any inhabited land is a palimpsest of human experience; but on this patch, as Nam suggests, stories are inscribed with a particular density. The longest and most significant of these is that of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, for whom Yarra Bend was an important meeting place and a traditional burial ground. Following European settlement, the Collins Street Baptist Church opened the Merri Creek Aboriginal School near Dights Falls, to cater for their children, but the Wurundjeri people were soon driven from the land, and the school closed six years later. Another chapter began with the arrival in Victoria of four Irish women from France in 1863, who purchased land for the convent and set about establishing a Magdalene asylum for the rehabilitation of penitents, or 'fallen women', whose transgressions ranged from insulting behaviour to 'being out at night with boys' to prostitution. Before long, the convent expanded to include an industrial school for neglected girls, a reformatory for 'criminal' girls, as well as an orphanage and day school. At its peak, in 1901, the Convent of the Good Shepherd was the largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere, housing more than a thousand inmates, and boasting vegetable gardens, a poultry farm, a dairy and piggery, alongside a successful laundry business that supplied linen to some of Melbourne's finest establishments, including the Windsor Hotel. For some women, the convent represented safe harbour and companionship, but for many others – as testified by shocking submissions to parliament – it was a site of trauma and abuse. Upon admittance to the Magdalene asylum, women were stripped of their birth names and issued with the name of a saint alongside a uniform. It was a literal process of whitewashing: not only of laundry, but of self. (Small wonder such ghosts return to trouble a poet working late on the second floor.) Residents were prohibited from leaving the grounds unsupervised, and worked punishing shifts in the laundries, in which accidents with the mangler were not uncommon. But business thrived. As journalist Alan Gill recalled, 'bad girls do the best sheets'. Over the 20th century, the convent mutated further to incorporate a youth training centre and a cooking and typing school, until it was sold and then taken over by La Trobe University. A developer's plans for an apartment block and golf course prompted the formation of the Abbotsford Convent Coalition in 1997, which fought successfully for the multi-arts precinct we know today. Loading Social history tours are now offered monthly, addressing the convent's 'dense repository of heritage', while the Sisters of the Good Shepherd have faced their own reckoning. In 2018, they unveiled a memorial in the chapel's garden, comprising a steel cylinder engraved with words nominated by former residents: shame, courage, fear, dreams, friendship, forgotten, anger. Of course there is no single version of the convent's history, but a clamorous polyphony, which since 2020 has incorporated the young musicians of the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM), based at the convent as they await the refurbishment of the South Melbourne Town Hall. Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen, the academy's artistic director, stepped into the role in 2021 with a commitment to engage the musicians with community, and for the convent to be a 'laboratory' of new ways to make music. He notes the site's 'troubled history', and seeks to 'make music here in ... a relevant way, and in a way that is connected to the place'. When Jumppanen asked me to devise a musical response to the location, I approached Nam Le, who over recent years has articulated a poetic geography of Melbourne from Altona to Collingwood, and asked him to create a poem drawing on his own experience of the convent. The result was the startling and powerful Abbotsford II in the form of a 'mangled sestina'. Le describes it as a poem 'that evokes some of these ghosts – through the personal prism of my time there'. The sestina is a rigorously challenging form, whose demands themselves speak of labour – one of the poem's themes – and whose end-word repetitions evoke the resonances of history. Le's subversion of these strictures recalls the notorious mangler of the Magdalene laundries and – perhaps – the distortions of memory, as he asks: How to commemorise/ the hidden lives, the pain, the silences that remain? This year, Le presented the poem to ANAM's entire cohort of young musicians. These are 65 of Australia's most exceptional young players, but not all of them are students of poetry, and I was unsure how this would land. Their responses were electric. Over the course of the ensuing workshop, a kaleidoscopic playlist emerged, responding to the poem's themes of labour, childhood, faith and trauma, drawn from the internalised music libraries the musicians carried within them. Afterwards, Le and I worked with a smaller curatorial team – Timothy O'Malley, Tom Allen and Shelby MacRae – to winnow these suggestions into an immersive program. The result is a true act of co-creation: a collaboration across art forms and generations, incorporating improvisation, the spoken word, and repertoire from a span of more than a thousand years, ranging from Hildegard von Bingen to Australian composer Kate Moore. The ANAM musicians' own experience of this environment becomes a resonating chamber around Le's response, picking up some of the reverberations – and silences – of this charged site.
The Age
2 hours ago
- The Age
Are the ghosts of this convent's ‘fallen women' about to be heard?
Today, the Abbotsford Convent seems like a utopian village. Children somersault on the lawns, artists labour in their studios, the sounds of Australian National Academy of Music performers practising spills out of the windows as the lowing of farm animals drifts in from the Collingwood Children's Farm next door. My memories of the convent are halcyon, comprising visits to the children's farm with my sons for vicarious first sightings of goats, cows and guinea pigs, and coffee-fuelled broadcasts from the 3MBS studios with my chamber music trio, Seraphim, alongside a wall inscribed with messages from friends, colleagues and, cringingly, our former selves. But these are brief, touristic impressions. Writer Nam Le, who occupied an artist's studio here for a decade, remembers: My studio was C2.46, on the second floor of the convent building, in its eastern (unofficial) 'Writer's Wing'. I often worked late – and was there alone after dark, visited only by the Wilson Security team. (It helped that I lived seven minutes' walk away.) During that time I felt intensely connected to the sisters, novices and postulants who had lived there since the mid-1800s. I sensed traces of their lives. And I felt intensely curious about these lives, the situations that had brought them there. After a bit of digging, I found my interest expanding to the history of the convent and the land on which it stands. This is land that is enormously significant to the Kulin Nation, whose connection to it extends back millennia. And it's also significant to the history of Melbourne, and the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony. It's a charged locus of church and state, a dense repository of heritage. And its incarnations over time – including as a convent, Magdalene asylum, farm, laundry, university, and (hard-fought-for) community space – exist simultaneously in that space, and give off compelling, even ghostly, energies. Any inhabited land is a palimpsest of human experience; but on this patch, as Nam suggests, stories are inscribed with a particular density. The longest and most significant of these is that of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, for whom Yarra Bend was an important meeting place and a traditional burial ground. Following European settlement, the Collins Street Baptist Church opened the Merri Creek Aboriginal School near Dights Falls, to cater for their children, but the Wurundjeri people were soon driven from the land, and the school closed six years later. Another chapter began with the arrival in Victoria of four Irish women from France in 1863, who purchased land for the convent and set about establishing a Magdalene asylum for the rehabilitation of penitents, or 'fallen women', whose transgressions ranged from insulting behaviour to 'being out at night with boys' to prostitution. Before long, the convent expanded to include an industrial school for neglected girls, a reformatory for 'criminal' girls, as well as an orphanage and day school. At its peak, in 1901, the Convent of the Good Shepherd was the largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere, housing more than a thousand inmates, and boasting vegetable gardens, a poultry farm, a dairy and piggery, alongside a successful laundry business that supplied linen to some of Melbourne's finest establishments, including the Windsor Hotel. For some women, the convent represented safe harbour and companionship, but for many others – as testified by shocking submissions to parliament – it was a site of trauma and abuse. Upon admittance to the Magdalene asylum, women were stripped of their birth names and issued with the name of a saint alongside a uniform. It was a literal process of whitewashing: not only of laundry, but of self. (Small wonder such ghosts return to trouble a poet working late on the second floor.) Residents were prohibited from leaving the grounds unsupervised, and worked punishing shifts in the laundries, in which accidents with the mangler were not uncommon. But business thrived. As journalist Alan Gill recalled, 'bad girls do the best sheets'. Over the 20th century, the convent mutated further to incorporate a youth training centre and a cooking and typing school, until it was sold and then taken over by La Trobe University. A developer's plans for an apartment block and golf course prompted the formation of the Abbotsford Convent Coalition in 1997, which fought successfully for the multi-arts precinct we know today. Loading Social history tours are now offered monthly, addressing the convent's 'dense repository of heritage', while the Sisters of the Good Shepherd have faced their own reckoning. In 2018, they unveiled a memorial in the chapel's garden, comprising a steel cylinder engraved with words nominated by former residents: shame, courage, fear, dreams, friendship, forgotten, anger. Of course there is no single version of the convent's history, but a clamorous polyphony, which since 2020 has incorporated the young musicians of the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM), based at the convent as they await the refurbishment of the South Melbourne Town Hall. Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen, the academy's artistic director, stepped into the role in 2021 with a commitment to engage the musicians with community, and for the convent to be a 'laboratory' of new ways to make music. He notes the site's 'troubled history', and seeks to 'make music here in ... a relevant way, and in a way that is connected to the place'. When Jumppanen asked me to devise a musical response to the location, I approached Nam Le, who over recent years has articulated a poetic geography of Melbourne from Altona to Collingwood, and asked him to create a poem drawing on his own experience of the convent. The result was the startling and powerful Abbotsford II in the form of a 'mangled sestina'. Le describes it as a poem 'that evokes some of these ghosts – through the personal prism of my time there'. The sestina is a rigorously challenging form, whose demands themselves speak of labour – one of the poem's themes – and whose end-word repetitions evoke the resonances of history. Le's subversion of these strictures recalls the notorious mangler of the Magdalene laundries and – perhaps – the distortions of memory, as he asks: How to commemorise/ the hidden lives, the pain, the silences that remain? This year, Le presented the poem to ANAM's entire cohort of young musicians. These are 65 of Australia's most exceptional young players, but not all of them are students of poetry, and I was unsure how this would land. Their responses were electric. Over the course of the ensuing workshop, a kaleidoscopic playlist emerged, responding to the poem's themes of labour, childhood, faith and trauma, drawn from the internalised music libraries the musicians carried within them. Afterwards, Le and I worked with a smaller curatorial team – Timothy O'Malley, Tom Allen and Shelby MacRae – to winnow these suggestions into an immersive program. The result is a true act of co-creation: a collaboration across art forms and generations, incorporating improvisation, the spoken word, and repertoire from a span of more than a thousand years, ranging from Hildegard von Bingen to Australian composer Kate Moore. The ANAM musicians' own experience of this environment becomes a resonating chamber around Le's response, picking up some of the reverberations – and silences – of this charged site.
Sky News AU
2 hours ago
- Sky News AU
Rosie O'Donnell shocks with new slimmed-down figure as she champions weight loss drug Mounjaro - after fleeing Trump's US for Ireland
Rosie O'Donnell has shocked with her new slimmed-down figure - after crediting controversial weight loss drug Mounjaro for the astonishing result. The 63-year-old, who has been embroiled in a long-running public feud with US President Donald Trump, has dramatically dropped down to a size 12. O'Donnell looks unrecognisable after the dramatic shift, which resulted in a face slimming effect. In a photo posted to Instagram on Wednesday, O'Donnell showed off her transformation in a slimming figure-hugging all-black athleisure outfit. The makeup-free snap showed the barefoot talk show host in a changing room on a shopping spree for new clothes ahead of a trip to Australia. O'Donnell will make her way Down Under in the coming weeks to perform her one-woman show, Common Knowledge, at Sydney's Opera House in October, where she will reflect on her recent move from the US to Ireland. Taking to the caption of her latest post, she praised Mounjaro for its "life-saving" effect on her overall confidence and ability to help shed weight. "Ok, so went shopping to buy a comfy lounge wear outfit for my 22-hour flight to Australia," O'Donnell wrote. "I was undecided as I can't see myself in this new, smaller body. "I am shocked, I'm a 12 - Mounjaro is a lifesaver." Mounjaro is an obesity medication that was initially used for treating type 2 diabetes until it gained popularity for its weight loss effects. The drug is in demand among Hollywood's elites as an alternative to conventional weight loss methods, which may not guarantee a lower number on the scale for people suffering underlying health conditions. O'Donnell's celebrity friends flocked to the comments to praise her trimmed-down figure, with actor Brad Garrett writing, "You look great". Meanwhile, Canadian singer Jann Arden said she was "super impressed" by the media personality's efforts, adding, "You look wonderful." "Snatched for the God," chimed actor Billy Porter. Another person said they were so glad O'Donnell was feeling healthier and happier after getting the help she needed to make a change. "You look fantastic. My mouth dropped. Gorgeous, but you always were," one more person said. "I love it! Very cute and looks comfortable! Excellent choice! Have a safe flight. You look fantastic," another fan said. O'Donnell was prescribed Mounjaro in January 2023 and said she immediately shed about 4kgs before dropping from an XL to a size 12. She took to TikTok in March to boast about her "shocking" new size. "I am on Mounjaro for my diabetes, and one of the side effects is you lose weight," O'Donnell said in a video. "But (the weight loss) is also because I had a chef for over two years in Los Angeles, and I don't have a chef now. "It's me cooking for (my son) Clay and me." It comes after O'Donnell moved from the US to her father's home country of Ireland with Clay in January after Trump's presidential re-election. At the time, she said she was "heartbroken" by the state of US politics amid her long-standing feud with the 78-year-old Republican. O'Donnell and Trump's long-standing disagreement dates back to 2006 when she publicly blasted him for holding a press conference to reinstate Miss USA Tara Conner, who had violated pageant guidelines. In response, Trump called O'Donnell 'a woman out of control', and the pair have since continued to wage a war of words on X, where he has said O'Donnell was "very vicious to him" and she "deserves" his disapproval.
