The Monday Treat for the office this week was Baklava, unlike previous attempts this one was made using Alton Brown’s recipe from Good Eats.

The recipe is available here: Good Eats Baklava.

I had to make some slight deviations from the recipe, I couldn’t find any shelled/unsalted pistachio’s so I just used almonds and walnuts only.  I also forgot to pickup all spice so it was just completely omitted.   The recipe still turned out much better then the 2 alternate recipes I’ve tried from Allrecipes.com. I do however have a couple of comments, firstly Alton’s suggestion to thaw the phylo pastry in the microwave was a disaster, it got all gooey and I had to throw a whole box away so I would suggest thawing in the fridge.  Secondly there seems to be slightly too much syrup as my 9×13 had a good half cm of syrup left after all the baklava was consumed, but I suppose it’s better to have too much rather then too little.

Here’s a snap I took of the 2 I kept back at home for us.

Overall it went over well with everyone at work and there were no leftovers for the vultures once I had passed them out.

Now to decide what to bring for next week, hopefully the new pantry will be done this weekend so I can have some time to bake something.  Perhaps I’ll pull something random out of the Cookies and Squares book I got for christmas.

Categories: Culinary Experiments, Monday Treat
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