I don't know the names of them, but a lot of Indian sweets are sugar-based (or milk- and sugar-based), with only a bit of flour and some mild spices/flavours ad

I don't know the names of them, but a lot of Indian sweets are sugar-based (or milk- and sugar-based), with only a bit of flour and some mild spices/flavours added. It isn't necessarily that Indian sweets are "too sweet", it's that they taste like sugar ("Duh, that's why they're called sweets"). They often use much larger sugar crystals, which greatly reduces the sweetness (its a surface area thing) and use unrefined sugar or cane-juice to emphasize the other flavours of sugar. At the extreme, there's pea-sized sugar crystals (and sugar clusters held together by I-don't-know-what) that you get from Tamil Nadu temples: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dh7AQ9EPWJ4/VV-E-0p17LI/AAAAAAAASkc/YoYP0N4PbKA/s640/shirdi%2Bsugar%2Bballs.gif https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dh7AQ9EPWJ4/VV-E-0p17LI/AAAAAAAAS... Western sweets by comparison almost always focus on a different flavour like chocolate, vanilla, nuts, fruits, mint, cinnamon, maple, etc (think of all the flavours of ice cream). Even Nerds, which are pretty much pure sugar, have malic acid to mimic the sour taste of fruit. There are western foods like marshmallows that are pretty flavourless though.