The Annual Baklava Jam
Janet and I have many unique traditions around the Christmas/New Year's holidays: we make chicken soup with matzoh balls on Christmas Eve, eat deli food (shipped overnight from New York) and make baklava. I don't really know where making baklava started for us but it's kind of a pain in the butt to make but also kind of fun and ends up being nice to have around the house for the inevitable drop-in guests...
Almond baklava. A bit of pulverized almond (almond ground with sugar) marks the top of this one...
Filo dough, finely chopped nuts, sugar, cinnamon, honey, lemon and of course, butter. Lots of melted butter. Layering dough with melted butter sounds easy enough but filo dough often has it's own ideas. The key is to thoroughly THAW the dough then keep it covered while working with it. Peeling each sheet takes some finesse but once you do it a few times, it's pretty easy. 4-6 sheets go down then some of the nuts are scattered evenly across the dough...more layers, more nuts and so on. Cut before baking, a bit more butter, then bake.
Walnut baklava. Pulverized pistachio gives a little hint of green and identifies this as the "walnut" version...
The really sweet component is the syrup made of honey, sugar, water, and lemon juice. All of this gets slowly boiled for 15-20 minutes. Once the baklava comes out of the oven, it gets poured over all of it. You *could* eat it while it's hot but it's better at room temperature as the syrup really gets to soak in.