What Moroccan sweets and pastries should I try?

Moroccan sweets are made for the tea ritual, and the crown of the platter is kaab el ghazal — "gazelle horns," delicate crescents of paper-thin pastry wrapped around almond paste scented with orange-blossom water. I remember biting into one in a Fez riad and tasting more perfume than sugar; they are restrained, elegant, never cloying. Beside them sit ghriba, crumbly shortbread rounds cracked across the top, some made with almond, some with sesame or coconut, each dissolving into sandy sweetness on the tongue.

Then come the fried, honey-drenched ones. Chebakia are my favourite spectacle: ribbons of sesame dough folded into a flower shape, fried until amber, then plunged into hot honey and showered with sesame seeds. They are sticky, floral, faintly aniseed, and inseparable from Ramadan tables. Briouats are their savoury-turned-sweet cousins — little triangular parcels of almond paste fried and bathed in honey, shattering crisp then turning soft and nutty inside.

For something rich and rustic, ask for sellou (also called sfouf), a pressed mound of toasted flour, browned almonds, sesame and honey eaten by the spoonful — dense, energy-packed, traditionally given to new mothers and broken out at celebrations. And do not miss the morning sweets sold from carts: sfenj, those airy ring doughnuts fried to order and dusted with sugar, and feqqas, twice-baked almond-and-anise biscotti meant for dunking.

My honest advice: buy from a busy neighbourhood patisserie rather than a tourist counter, point at whatever the locals are buying, and order a mixed quarter-kilo. Pair everything with a glass of sweet mint tea — the bitterness of the tea is the deliberate counterweight to the honey. On our culinary journeys we build a pastry-and-tea tasting into the afternoon so you taste a dozen at once and learn which workshop made them.