Highlight #214: Baklava again! - Bakery: International Bakery

With work, I am super careful about meeting deadlines. Thinking back, I can't actually remember any disastrous inadvertent misses in my eight years of dealing with time critical cases. Outside of work, now that's a different story. I am the worst slacker EVER.

Exhibit A, my first wedding anniversary is almost up and I am just getting around to figuring out what to do with my wedding dress. Don't worry, it has been cleaned. By what to do, I mean making it suitable for reuse. Yes, I said reuse, not as a wedding dress, but as a party dress to wear any time. It never really made any sense to me that I would spend all that money on a dress I love and then never to wear it again.

In this case, reuse is made easier by the fact that I insisted on tailoring my wedding dress from a floor length gown to tea length for the tropical wedding. It had to be special ordered because I also asked that the lace details, which used to fan out near the floor, to be moved up to the bodice. It ended up being perfect for the hot weather, my sub-human sized frame, and gave me something functional to work with now.

Long story short, my reconstruction plan came quick. I will swap out the champagne colored belt for another color and trim the inside lining towards the bottom of the lace in the same color of the belt. It makes sense in my head. We'll see how it turns out when the tailor is done.

If you are starting to wonder what this has to do with food, worry not, eating was most certainly on my mind as I went shopping for my swap out satin at Gail K on Cheshire Bridge. Just a little stretch down the same road is International Bakery, hidden in a tiny strip of four or five stores. I have never seen any other customers while there, but the old fashioned Greek desserts always delighted. Normally, I get the eclair or the cookies. But this time, I went straight for the baklava. Those great ones from Analya must have really turned on a switch in my brain.

This one is a little different from the one from Analya, however. Haven't eaten enough of these, I am unsure if the difference is due to cultural variations between the Greek and the Turk. In any case, the pistachio in this version is less green and taste more toasted. Also, the honey syrup is less soaked in and more runny. Most significantly, the phyllo sheets are less integrated and exist more as a separate top layer in preserved crunchiness. This is a good bakalava, no doubt, not coyly sweet or excessively dense. But when compared to the greener and more integrated version at Analya, I prefer the later's delicate sensibility just a bit more.

International Bakery
2165 Cheshire Bridge Rd NE # 5,
Atlanta
(404) 636-7580