Bakla-what?

Baklava! I had a Mediterranean-themed party and got overly ambitious and decided to make baklava for dessert. I had only eaten once before but I remembered it being somewhat heavenly and, as I am fairly confident in my ability to follow a recipe, I decided to try my hand at it. I searched Google for a good recipe and was feeling kind of discouraged because I kept reading that it was difficult to make and definitely should not be prepared by a novice (which I would unequivocally categorize myself as). I settled on this recipe.

First, here are the ingredients:

Everything was easy to find; the phyllo dough was in the freezer section so I just left it out to let it thaw after I got home from the grocery store. The first step is to chop the nuts and admittedly I was really excited because my mom had given me this a while ago and I’d never used it.

A food processor! I plugged it in, fiddled with it…nothing. I kept messing with it and couldn’t get to work so I resorted to the old-fashioned method for chopping nuts.

Let’s just say that chopping a pound of nuts by hand is not my idea of fun on a Friday night! After mixing the chopped nuts with the cinnamon, it was layering time…for a long time. I did not put a layer of butter on top of the nut mixture in my layering, but I would recommend doing that so that the phyllo dough adheres to the nut mixture and doesn’t separate. I saw in the comments of this recipe on the website that someone recommended using spray butter or melted butter in a sprayer and I can see how this would be helpful as phyllo dough tears really, really easily. I used a basting brush to add the butter and I tore the dough a few times. After all the layering, I put it in the oven to bake, made up the liquid honey mixture, and poured it over the baklava in the pan when it was done baking. This is what it looked like after I poured the honey mixture on it:

I let this sit out overnight (I had read that it actually tastes better after it sits out) uncovered (again, I read that it would get soggy if it was covered) and put the pieces in cupcake liners to serve (which I apparently didn’t take a picture of). This was delicious; my memory was right, it does taste heavenly! It is very rich though, so next time I will cut this up into smaller pieces.

While I will say that my baklava-making experience was not difficult, it was time-consuming. As in, I started this at 11:00pm (why, why, why??) and crawled into bed with sore feet at 1:00am or shortly thereafter. But, it was oh-so-worth-it!