Baklava

• By Matty Cremona

This Middle Eastern pastry is delicious and matches the cinnamon and orange tea perfectly.

You will need:

400g of filo pastry (I use a brand called Theo’s), 300–350g of butter (melted), 500g of blanched almonds, one tablespoonful of ground cinnamon.

For the syrup, you will need: 300g of sugar, 100g of honey, 200ml of water, half a lemon (squeezed).

Preheat the oven to gas mark 5/190 C. If necessary, cut the sheets of pastry so that they are slightly larger than the baking-tin, which should be 20cm x 30cm. Keep them covered with a damp dish-cloth, so that they don’t dry out and harden. Grind the almonds together with the cinnamon in a food processor, until you have a medium-to-fine consistency. Brush the base of the baking-tin with a little melted butter, then put down 10 layers of pastry, brushing thoroughly with melted butter in between the sheets. Sprinkle half the ground almond-and-cinnamon mixture on top of this pile of layers. Now put down another five sheets of pastry, brushed with melted butter, and cover this with the rest of the almond-and-cinnamon mix. Top it all with another 10 sheets of pastry brushed with melted butter, making sure that the top sheet has quite a good covering of butter. Using a sharp knife, cut down into the pastry to make little lozenge shapes. The simplest way to do this is to cut parallel lines down the length of the tin, then cut at an angle across these. Bake this for 30 minutes, then turn the heat down to gas mark 3/160C and bake it for another 30 minutes until it is golden and slightly puffy. While it is baking, make the syrup by dissolving the sugar in the water and boiling it for about five minutes, the stir in the honey and lemon juice, boil it again briefly and leave it to cool. Pour the syrup over the cooked pastry as soon as you remove it from the oven, then allow it to cool thoroughly. Re-cut the baklava along the lines you have already marked out, and separate the pieces.