Sunday, November 3, 2013

Note: this post is not Pinterest-worthy

Lily and I made baklava today.  It may not be authentic, it may not be pretty, but it worked for us.

Last weekend when we went trick-or-treating at Waverly Place, Taziki's was giving out samples of baklava.  Madeleine was having none of it, but Lily tried it and liked it.  She asked if we could buy some at the store.  Of course I didn't see anything at our local HT.

So this weekend I had a coupon for puff pastry and thought we'd try it.  Well, first of all "puff pastry" isn't the same thing as phyllo.  So a phyllo recipe isn't going to work the same.  Then I would have had to remembered to thaw phyllo 24 hours ahead of time.  Which I hadn't.  So I visited puffpastry.com and luckily they had a baklava recipe.  And the dough had to be thawed only 40 minutes ahead of time.  Winner!

So Lily and I set to work shelling pistachios.  I think I have shells and errant nuts throughout my kitchen.

IMG_3967

It gave us some good time to chat.

IMG_3969
Then we got all our ingredients together.  By then the dough had thawed enough to roll out.
IMG_3976
She loved chopping the nuts with the food processor.
IMG_3971
Lily paints on the egg wash.
IMG_3980
We combined the nuts, butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon in a sauce pan.
IMG_3989
Baked pastry.
IMG_3990
The tough part was splitting the pastry in half to fill with the nut mixture.  The outside was crisp and wanted to flake off.  Sometimes it was hard to pull apart.
IMG_3991
The honey/sugar glaze has been applied.
IMG_3993
Lily with her final product.
IMG_3992


1 comment:

LauraC said...

Trader Joe's sells shelled pistachios for the future, btw. Same price as the ones in the shell!