One of the distinct and delicious benefits to working with people from all over the world is that when they travel home, or when their respective families come to visit, all sorts of delicious and unique treats show up in the office hallways. This time, the mother of one of my Turkish colleagues came to visit bearing boxes of "the best balkava in the world" from a bakery in their hometown.
Now I don't usually think of baklava as juicy but this stuff was exactly that (very different from the stuff at Gorgeous George's but both are amazingly delicious.) Practically dripping, as it was, with the sticky syrup that binds the 40 layers of dough and nuts together, it was just about impossible to extract a piece from the box without both becoming covered in stickiness and also without breaking the piece in half. But no matter - part of the fun is licking your fingers afterwards. The green in the picture is finely-ground pistachio that becomes a paste in the middle layer of the pasty and is also sprinled on top. The pistachios a little tart and salty, too. Somehow, despite the intense sweetness, the pastry is also savoury and even refreshing, though I might have found it a little overwhelmingly intense had I not, fortuitously, had a cup of iced mint tea to hand at the time.
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