Cut the lemon in half, and add the juice of the lemon to a medium sized pan, along with the rest of the lemon. You will be making a candied lemon in the syrup, which you can use for other desserts. At the same time, the lemon rind will add a slightly bitter flavor to the syrup reminiscent of a bitter orange marmalade. I was worried about that the first time, but liked the final flavor in the baklava. If you want to avoid it, though, you can choose to add just the juice and the yellow zest of the lemon to the syrup instead.
Add the sugar, honey, cinnamon sticks, and water to the pan, and simmer over the stove for around an hour. My neighbor used 4 cups sugar, but said you could use 3 cups sugar and 1 cup honey instead, which is what I used this year. After cooking the syrup for an hour, the lemon will become caramelized, and the syrup will thicken. Strain out the lemon and cinnamon sticks and allow the syrup to cool while you make the baklava pastry.
Make the baklava pastry
Preheat the oven to 350ºF/177ºC.
Mix together the ground nuts with the sugar and spices. (You want to reach 8 cups total of ground nuts, but you can switch up the nuts used to suit your preference. Walnuts, pecans, almonds, and pistachios are good choices.)
If using butter, you want to clarify it to ensure a crispy baklava. You do this by melting the butter and skimming off any foam that forms on top. You also want to avoid using milk solids on the bottom. You only want to use the golden butterfat component. I usually use homemade ghee for this recipe because I always have some on hand, and it's simple to use because you only need to melt it and use it directly. It works really well in this recipe.
Using a pastry brush, grease a 12x17 inch pan with melted, clarified butter or ghee.
Cover the pan with one sheet of filo dough, and paint the entire sheet of pastry with a thin layer of melted clarified butter or ghee. You may need to cut the filo to fit your pan. I had to cut off around a centimeter of each side for mine. You can either use a knife or kitchen scissors.
Cover the first sheet of filo with another sheet of pastry, and once again cover it with butter. Continue to add layers of filo pastry, covering each sheet with a thin layer of clarified butter, until you have added 10 layers to your pan.
Cover the first group of 10 layers of filo with 1/3 of the nut mixture. Make sure to spread the nuts evenly over the pastry.
Cover the nut mixture with another 10 layers of filo, doing as before, painting each layer with a thin layer of clarified butter. I like to paint both sides of the first layer with butter to help keep it in place on top of the layer of nuts.
Sprinkle half of the remaining nut mixture evenly over the filo. (You should still have 1/3 of the original mixture reserved for the final layer.)
Once again cover the nut mixture with another 10 layers of buttered filo, and cover those 10 layers with the rest of the nut mixture.
Add the final 10 layers of buttered filo to your pan. You want to finish with a sheet of buttered filo.
Carefully cut the baklava into pieces (before baking the baklava). You can choose to cut it however you like, but my neighbor always chose a diamond pattern. You can cut a diamond pattern by making diagonal cuts all across the pan, followed by horizontal cuts all the way across. I made mine a bit too large this year, and ended up later cutting each diamond piece in half to have more reasonable sized pieces.
Optionally push a whole clove into the center of each piece of baklava as decoration.
Bake the baklava for around 1 hour, until it starts to turn a golden brown.
Remove the baklava from the oven, and pour the cool syrup over the hot baklava.
Allow the baklava to cool. Once cooled, the syrup will help hold the baklava together.
Notes
Nutritional information calculated according to cutting the baklava into 55 pieces. (That's the equivalent of cutting all of the larger diamond pieces in the photos in half, which is what I ended up doing because I found the larger diamonds too big.)