Baghlava for Norooz

Once again Norooz, “new day”, spring, the Persian New Year is upon us; so is the earth’s rejuvenation and the hope! Hope for more sun, more warmth, more kindness, more peace – hope for better days.  It is that time of the year we prepare for our new year by doing a lot of things including baking delicacies for our new year sofreh.

This year I decided to try my hands on a rather complicated homemade sweet, called baghlava, باقلوا in Persian – an extremely delicious walnut-almond rich layers brought together by fragrant honey-rosewater syrup.

Following Persian Mama’s recipe, it turned out  that the sweet baking was not hard at all; it was a bit time consuming, true, but worth every second!  The only drawback was that it tasted so good and soothing I had a real hard time stopping myself taking one morsel after another.

So, here is the original recipe. I followed it very closely and was super happy with the result. The only difference is that I made it in a smaller dish using 2/3 of the ingredients (another reason I may need to start the second batch so that I would be able to offer some of it to my norooz visitors!)   If this is your first time too, don’t be intimidated by the long list of instruction. You will note soon enough that for most part the steps are simply repeated one after the other (to do layer after layer of the baghlava).

I wish you all a very happy healthy Persian new year. Norooz mobarak!