When it comes to dessert, I crave the richest stuff. I’m always in the mood for chocolate, or cheesecake, or a butterscotch bread pudding. With vanilla ice cream, please. So it’s sometimes hard for me to get excited about typical desserts from the Middle East and North Africa, where it’s all about nuts and honey and filo dough and tends to be very sweet and a little syrupy.
I have a full shelf of Middle Eastern and North African cookbooks, and every book on Morocco has a recipe for an intriguing “almond snake.” Worn down by so many subliminal suggestions, and feeling a little smug about the challenge of rolling individual filo sheets, I put the recipe on my to-do list about a year ago. The ingredients – essentially just filo, almonds, orange blossom water and cinnamon – are always in my pantry and freezer, but every time it came to defrosting the dough and getting down to business, I would grimace internally and decide to save the project for another day. It seemed like a lot of work, and I wasn’t sure I’d be into the finished product.
Two weekends ago, a bit worn out from throwing a Friday night dinner party and heavily procrastinating on year-end timesheets I desperately needed to finish for work, I remembered this m’hencha. Lured by the promise of an hour spent not billing time, I defrosted the box of filo and dumped my almonds in the food processor with the orange blossom water, cinnamon and sugar. With the filling paste made, I got to work laying it out on the long edge of the filo and carefully rolling up the delicate dough, shaping it into a spiral pattern on a baking sheet, which I’d obviously forgotten to line with tin foil ahead of time. Every time the dough split, which was many times, my expectations lowered further.
Against all odds, my journey ended in a real confectionary spectacle. After its allotted time in the oven, my snake looked pretty impressive, with filling oozing out of only a few areas where the dough had dried out and split. I let it cool off, and even managed to remove it from the baking sheet with no issue! At this point I felt my luck had surely run out and this would taste terrible, but I was wrong again! A delicious pastry, dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar and filled with a chewy not-too-sweet nutty interior…it was absolutely delicious, and served with vanilla ice cream, it was something truly dazzling.
The original recipe serves a small army so I have adapted it to fit onto a half sheet baking pan.
Ingredients
- 3 1/4 cups ground almonds
- 2 1/2 cups superfine sugar
- 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
- A drop of almond extract
- 1/2 lb. fillo dough
- 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, melted
- 1 egg yolk for glazing
- To decorate: confectioner's sugar, 1/2 tablespoon ground cinnamon
Instructions
- Mix all the filling ingredients together and work them into a stiff paste with your hands. Use just enough orange blossom water to bind the paste. Put in less than you seem to require, as once you start kneading with your hands, the oil form the almonds will act as an extra hold.
- Take the sheets of fillo out of the package only when you are ready to use them and keep them in a pile (so they do not dry out) with one of the longer sides facing you. Lightly brush the top sheet with melted butter. Take lumps of the almond paste and roll into "fingers" about 3/4 inch thick. On the top sheet, place the "fingers" end to end in a line all along the long edge nearest to you, about 3/4 inch from the edge, to make one long rod of paste. Roll the sheet of fillo up and over the filling into a long, thin roll, tucking the ends in to stop the filling from oozing out.
- Lift up the roll carefully with both hands and place it in the middle of a sheet of foil on the largest possible baking sheet or oven tray. Very gently curve the roll into a tight coil. To do so without tearing the fillo, you have to crease the pastry first like an accordion by pushing the ends of the roll gently towards the center with both hands.
- Do the same with the other sheets until all the filling is used up, rolling them up with the filling inside, and placing one end to the open end of the coil, making it look like a coiled snake.
- Brush the top of the pastry with the egg yolk mixed with 1 teaspoon of water and bake in an oven preheated to 325°F for 30 to 40 minutes, until crisp and lightly browned.
- Let the pastry cool before you slide it, with its sheet of foil, onto a very large serving platter or tray.
- Serve cold, sprinkled with plenty of confectioners' sugar and with lines of cinnamon drawn on like the spokes of a wheel. Cut the pastry as you would a cake, in wedges.
Notes
Adapted from Arabesque
