Pretending to be Greek

So my friend Tori and I always somehow end up in her kitchen baking something when we are at her house. Last week we decided to increase the difficulty and tackle baklava. 

I really don't know what we were thinking.

If any of you have ever had baklava before then you know it is essentially just a lot of layers of dough with some kind of nut mixture in the middle and covered in honey. That doesn't sound too difficult to bake, right? WRONG. 

At first we tried it using store bought phillo dough, and managed to rip every single layer of the too-thin dough. Then we tried making our own homemade dough only to realize that there is no humanly way possible to get the dough that thin...at least not with our lack of upper body strength.

Do not fear, though! Despite all the frustration of making it, it appears that it is impossible to bake baklava that doesn't taste wonderful! I mean, I'm guessing the real secret is in the honey syrup that you put on top of it in the end versus the dough, but honestly baklava is just one of those treats that is impossible to ruin. Unless you burn it I guess. I'm just going to assume that won't happen.

We started off the day making iced coffee with blackberries (And boy, am I glad we had coffee on hand!)

And then went straight into the baklava making....for five hours!

And like I said before, they turned out delicious both with homemade dough and store bought dough (though for your sanity I would say just buy the store dough!).

So, what do you think? Will any of you be pretending to be Greek soon?

Recipes for the baklava and the phillo dough were found on allrecipes.com