Galaktoboureko!

No, I'm not speaking jibberish, it's Greek!  Galaktoboureko is our favorite Greek dessert.  We've tried it in several restaurants and have always wanted to make it at home.  Simply put, it is a semolina custard baked in a phyllo dough crust with orange syrup poured over the top.

Ever since election night, when we used phyllo to make a strudel, we have had leftover phyllo that we've been saving for galaktoboureko.  Brett's job was to find a suitable recipe and my job was to find semolina.  I had to hunt a little but I found some at the third store I tried.  We had all our ingredients for about a week and we either didn't feel like making it yet or we would forget to thaw out the phyllo.  Well yesterday the stars aligned because I remembered to set out the phyllo and Brett felt like baking.  A strange coincidence, that I swear we did not plan, is that we used our leftover phyllo from election night on Inauguration Day.  I even made a (very corny) joke that we should call our dessert galakto-Barack-o....get it?  Well, I think it's funny anyway, and it got a smile out of Brett.

Brett made the orange syrup and the semolina custard while I watched.  When it came time to work with the phyllo I assisted by handing Brett new sheets and keeping the unused sheets covered to prevent drying.  He was in charge of the butter brush and layering.  The recipe called for half the sheets on the bottom and half the sheets on top.  We put 6 sheets on the bottom and then poured in the custard.

The baking dish we were using was pretty small (we halved the recipe) so the overhanging phyllo dough was able to fold over on top of all the custard.  We decided to put one new layer on top to hold it all together.  The recipe recommended cutting it before it went in the oven.  

We baked it and it turned out nice and golden.  Brett poured the syrup over the top to give it more flavor and to make it nice and shiny.

It was hard to extract just one (very large) serving from the pan but Brett used a spatula and a fork and I had a fork also and we managed to get it out relatively cleanly by using teamwork.

Yummy!  It was certainly good.  It's hard to go wrong with phyllo and custard.  The only problem was that we could not discern any sort of orange flavor.  Next time, we'll have to amp up the orange.  But otherwise, it was a total success.