June Daring Kitchen Challenge

This month's Daring Kitchen baking challenge was making baklava. No problem! Then I read further.... baklava with homemade phyllo dough. Wha? It never occurred to me that someone could (or would) actually make phyllo dough. To me, it was something that has always been in the frozen foods section at the local grocery store ... yes, even back in Ancient Greek times, it was still in the frozen foods section!!

I had a few issues with this challenge. The first was my own fault: the recipe recommended doubling the ingredients. No problem! I doubled the dries. However, I forgot to double the wets. Whoops. Scrapped that wad of dough and started over ... doubling ALL of the ingredients. MUCH better! The second issue came from me placing the baking dish on the stack of phyllo sheets I painstakingly rolled out so I could cut them to to fit. Big mistake. The weight of the pan made all of the sheets stick together. Whoops! At that point, I pulled out the handy-dandy pasta machine and rolled out the dough (AGAIN) using less elbow grease. Perfect! The only recipe-based issue I had was that it called for too much honey syrup... too wet. Even with all of the issues, it still tasted REALLY good!

Erica of Erica’s Edibles was our host for the Daring Baker’s June challenge. Erica challenged us to be truly DARING by making homemade phyllo dough and then to use that homemade dough to make Baklava.