Baklava!

One thing about moving from one part of the world to another to live is that no matter how much I might be enjoying my current home, I always miss the places I lived in before. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this. My friend Jacqui from Fashion & Pho lived in Turkey for a while and still talks about it all the time! Food is usually paramount in most people's memories, including mine and Jacqui's! When she said she wanted to try making baklava, I couldn't help but remember wandering into a bakery in Amman, Jordan and buying a bagful of sticky honey-flavoured sweets....

...or the time when, on our last night in Cairo, Jeff and I thought we were treating ourselves to two pieces of cake, and accidentally ended up with a massive two kilo box of delicious, crunchy, sweet treats!

What two kilos of Egyptian sweets looks like!

Of COURSE, I desperately wanted to get in on Jacqui's baklava fun!

We found with this recipe on http://www.allrecipes.com/, and thanks to the reviewers, we knew to make the honey syrup first, so it could be cool when we poured it on the hot baklava. The previous reviewers also said we should make 1.5 times as much syrup, but because my pan was a bit smaller than the one they said to use, we just went with the full amount on the recipe, and it was perfect!

While I was doing this, Jacqui got busy shelling pistachios!

We then ground them up in my blender and added cinnamon and a bit of nutmeg.

Assembly was tedious, but pretty easy. I had found some phyllo pastry in one of the imported food shops here, and it magically fit perfectly in the pan I had if we folded it over into thirds. And so it went...pastry-melted butter-ground nuts-pastry-melted butter-ground nuts.....over and over and over again.

Jacqui's excited about BAKLAVA!

 When it was all layered together and we were out of ingredients, we sprinkled the last few nuts on top and cut it into pieces.

Then it went into the oven for about 45 minutes and came out looking like this:

Next it was time to pour the syrup on.

Can you see the syrup down in the cracks? That's going to seep in between all the layers of pastry and pistachios until it's all soaked up.

We waited for it to cool down for just about as long as we could stand it (all of about 3 minutes), then started feasting!

This was SO good. So good that I couldn't stop eating it. So good that Jacqui said she got up in the middle of the night to eat some more. So good that I've been craving it just about every day since I finished it off! So good that despite the amount of work and all the other things I want to make and the cost of the ingredients, I still want to do this again and again and again!