The Cinderella of desserts made its way into the Middle Eastern world almost 700 years back and since then until now there has been no body who has not liked this appetizing desert. Made with great care and sheer love this is famous all over, Turkey, Armenia, Syria and Azerbaijan. This delectable dessert the nutty flavours of walnuts and pistachio which melts effortlessly into your mouth once you chew it with the layers of filo dough. The addition of honey and sugar syrup adds cherry on this dessert and undeniably accentuates the tantalizing flavours of this dessert. The buttery flavours of filo dough combined with the spicy cinnamon and aromatic cardamom makes your head reel in the garden of flavours and will make you crave for more without a tinge of doubt.
Ingredients:
- 10g salt
- ½ kg butter
- 10 Eggs
- 30g Honey
- 30g wine vinegar
- ½ kg walnuts nicely chopped
- 250g Sugar
- 1 Orange for its zest
- 1 Lemon for its zest
- 10g Cardamom
- 10g Cinnamon
- 20 pistachio chopped
- 10-12 Roasted almonds chopped
Now let’s look at the procedure to make this:
First we have to make the filo dough.
- To make the Filo follow the steps below:
- Take all-purpose flour in a bowl
- Make a hole in the middle and pour in some amount of extra virgin olive oil, some salt, white wine vinegar, baking powder, egg, and some warm water.
- Now simply knead the dough like we knead any other dough and make it really soft.
- Now we’ll allow over worked up dough to rest for an hour by wrapping it up in plastic and leaving it in the room temperature.
- After time flies for an hour, take out your dough from the plastic and make small balls of about 20g each.
- Now make take some corn-starch along with some flour and after whisking it a little we’ll sieve it on the rolling board.
- Now we’ll take our small balls of dough and start rolling them into a 5-6 inch flat bread.
- We’ll make a few of these bread and cover it up with corn-starch to keep them from sticking to each other.
- Now once we have rolled out all the small balls of dough, we stack them together.
- Now we apply more corn starch and again keep rolling.
- Now we’ll pick out on thin sheet and unroll it with our rolling pin so that the sheet gets wrapped around our rolling pin. This way once one sheet is unrolled and wrapped on our rolling pin we put more corn starch onto the remaining sheets, we repeat this with more and more sheets slowly one at a time. This will ensure that the sheets don’t stick with each other while baking.
- Now we’ll again roll our entire stack to make it as thin as possible.
- Once we have made our Filo dough we will now blend the walnut and pistachio in a blender.
Time to make our filling
- Add in sugar, cinnamon and cardamom powder into it with the orange and lemon zest and blend it well.
Finally the last and most essential part of baking
- Next simply take your baking tray or dish and grease it up with butter.
- Now add the first sheet of filo dough. On top of that we spread out some more butter and again add another sheet of the filo dough. We repeat this process eight times to make eight layers of filo dough at the bottom. Don’t forget to drip out some butter between each and every single layers.
- Next, we take our filling and evenly spread it out over the layers of sheets.
- Now we’ll again add six more layers of butter and filo and then more filling.
- We have to do this more five times, until we are left with the last layer which will have eight sheets of buttered filo.
- This way at last we’ll have six layers of filo.
- Now put this into the 350degree pre heated oven.
Now we’ll make the syrup
- Take a sauce pan and add your water, honey, sugar and only if you really want squeeze one lemon into the pan.
- Now put in on the stove and keep stiring until your sugar melts and keep it aside to cool.
- Now after 45 minutes bring out your baking tray and slowly spread out the syrup over your baklavas.
And now see within no time you have made yourself the love of people all across the world, the divine Baklavas. So share it with your friends and family and don’t forget to pat on your back for making such a delightful dessert.
image source: missysspiceshop.com