i loathe to admit it, but one of the latest tiktok crazes has absolutely captivated me.

a few months ago, i encountered the dubai pistachio chocolate bar while shopping at a hallmark paper store. i love pistachio, i thought naively. then i flipped that sucker over to see a $35 price tag.

the lady behind the counter confirmed the price and told me she had tried it, but didn't think it was even that good, which satisfied my curiosity. temporarily.

after that encounter, my tiktok algorithm dutifilly served me up ads for dubai chocolate bars1 and memes about how often people were mixing their own filling at home.

(side note: while writing that last paragraph, found myself wondering what's supposed to be in the original dubai chocolate bar that got popular, since my recipe below was just me winging what i thought was in it. i never actually looked up any kind of official recipe or ingredient list, which, looking back, seems pretty foolish of me. whatever. that's not my point. my point is: while the original chocolate bar contains a filling of "a sweet cream made from pistachios mixed with finely chopped kadayif and tahini paste"2, i did not include tahini when making mine.

i had already decided that i wanted to try it, so by the time it made a surprise appearance at a work lunch, i had already ordered a jar of pistachio cream online that i'd seen people use when posting about making their own.

it's getting late and my husband is yawning, so i will get to the nut here and post the recipe i'm ashamed to say i've been shoveling down my stoned gullet nonstop the past few days:

i've just been taking a spoon, mixing it all up, and pigging out.

1: unsurprisingly with food items originating from tiktok fame, this food trend is tied to health concerns. a german study (also referenced on wikipedia. don't come for me) of some of the knockoffs being hocked via the tiktok shop found "five of these samples were also assessed as unsuitable for consumption and thus as "not safe" due to an almost double exceedance of the maximum value for glycidyl fatty acid esters, as they had an unacceptably high level of contamination with a substance classified as 'probably carcinogenic'. These samples were products from the same UAE manufacturer." this gives me flashbacks to that bizarre bubblegum-pink sauce that some tiktok lady was selling. some of that might still be haunting some walmart's clearance section.

2: this felt too important not to note - the description of this dessert on its wikipedia page is attributed to a forbes article about the demand for pistachios being particularly high. this felt important to note, especially since i can't remember where i read that california is now the biggest producer of pistachios, and demand for pistachios has been artificially inflated...is that true, or is that someone's conspiracy theory i absorbed inadvertantly?