Today everything is about Greek.

The Greeks don't like sweets or puddings or musses for dessert. They prefer to finish a meal with fresh fruit which they have in magnificent selection. Oranges and mandarins that ripen in the winter and followed by medlars, which ripen in spring. Excellent strawberries and very popular cherries are the next in season. In early summer they have apricots, plums and peaches. Then come melons and bananas with their distinctive flavor, apples and pears and grapes.
Of coarse, Greece is well-known with a large variety of sweet specialties. The Geeks don't eat them as a pudding , but consume them in the afternoon or later in the evening. Often sweets that have to be consumed with a spoon served with glika koutaliou. As custom claims they are served in a silver bowl, from it a hang spoons with which guests help them selfs. The bowl contains fruit in syrup: figs, cherries, grapes, apricots and even green tomatoes, bitter oranges.



Balklawas
Nut pastry
ingredients:

• 250 g butter 500 g sheets of Fillo pastry
• 1 kg almonds chopped
• 3 tsp cinnamon
• 650 g sugar
• Peel of 1 orange
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1/2 cup honey
• 2 tsp rose water
• 3 cloves
  

Melt the butter. Line a rectangular baking form, greased with butter, a sheet of Fillo and brush the Fillo sheet with melted butter. Butter another nine pastry sheets and add them one by one to the baking form. Cover upper layer with damp of cloth to prevent from drying out. Mix almonds, cinnamon and 125 g of sugar. Spread a thin layer of almond mixture over the pastry and cover with more 3 sheets of Fillo, each brushed with butter. Spread another layer of almond mixture and cover again with Fillo sheet as before and continue in this way until all the almonds filling has been used. The upper layer must be one of Fillo. Brush all over hanging pastry with butter and tuck it in. Mark the forms with a very sharp knife or with diamond-shaped pattern. Brush more butter and moisten with water. Bake in preheated oven (160 C) for about 75 minutes until baklawas is golden.
During baking, mix the remaining sugar with orange peel, cloves and cinnamon with 2 cups of water and bring it to a boil. Simmer for about 15-20 minutes and remove spices and orange peel. Add honey and the rose-water and continue to stirring well for some seconds. Remove from the flame and let it cool. Pour the syrup over the finished baklawas and leave over night. Don't refrigerate it! Cut into portions like marked and serve your really Greek baklawas.