Tempting Tuesday: trying not to kill my family with my experimental cooking.
What I thought was the ingredients:
350g caster sugar
the juice of one lemon
270g pack filo pastry sheets
175g butter, melted
175g mixed chopped nuts
3 tbsp. honey
As I write this, I now realise what went so horribly wrong with my attempt at this.
The recipe I had in my collection was impossible to follow due to a fatal flaw (it never mentioned what the hell I was supposed to do with the honey despite having it in the ingredients list) and meant that I had to Google other versions, but that has helped me understand it much better and it has pointed out to me where I went wrong. It turns out I not only used about half the amount of filo pastry sheets as I should have done, I mis-read the amount of nuts and only put in 175g of mixed nuts rather than 175g each of walnuts, almonds and pistachios and I thought I'd been too shy with the butter and poured the leftovers over the whole lot before putting it in the oven. That goes a long way to explaining why the hell my beautiful baklava was incredibly soggy and needed to be drained on a rack.
If you don't cock up the ingredients, it is really easy to make. And by golly, it's yummy.
Amended version so you make a sensible sized version and only have to buy one pack of filo pastry.
Ingredients:
175g sugar
juice of one lemon
270g pack filo pastry sheets
100g butter, melted
2 tbsp honey
200g mixed nuts, chopped finely
Preheat the oven to 180°C (160°C fan).
Heat sugar, honey and lemon juice in a pan with 175ml water, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Simmer for about ten minutes until all syrupy. Remove from the heat and chill.
You can be super pedantic about cutting your pastry sheets so they fit perfectly in your pan, or you can just bung them in in a layer-like fashion. I tried to cut around my pan, but I soon realized it wouldn't matter either way, not really.
The pack I bought had 7 sheets in it. I cut it all into half, which gave me 14 squares. So, I layered it up as follows; 4 sheets -
⅓ of the nuts - 4 sheets - ⅓ of the nuts - 3 sheets - ⅓ of the nuts - 3 sheets.
Remember to save some nuts for the top, or just grab more. You can't have too many nuts.
Butter a baking tin.
Brush butter over each layer as you put it in.
Sprinkle the nuts over evenly so you have them spread out nicely over 3 layers.
When you're done, slice through the whole lot in whatever size/shape pieces you want. This is important. My crappy recipe told me to 'score' the top layer, which is laughable as I'm pretty certain that pastry, once cooked, is not going to be sliced up without entirely falling to pieces.
Bake in the oven for 1 hour.
When you take it out the oven, pour the honey syrup gently over the whole lot (the nut topping will get all discombobulated if you're too rough). It should sizzle excitedly.
Now comes the torturous wait. 4 looooooong hours, at least. Overnight is even better.
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