Immigrate to Greece and taste Greek cuisine: The traditional dessert that is a household name in villages and cities across Greece is the "spoon sweet," a fruit preserve made of seasonal fruits soaked in thick syrup. The fruits can be citrus, figs, sour cherries, grapes, apricots, or cherries. Following the national catastrophe of the failed expedition to Asia Minor in 1922, when over a million refugees from Asia Minor and the Kingdom of Pontus flooded into the Greek mainland, Greece began to encounter the rich Eastern tradition of dessert making. Today, there is a wide variety of desserts that have truly joined the ranks of baklavas and other indulgent delicacies.
Honey (preferably thyme honey) and nuts (walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, pistachios) are the basic ingredients used in most Greek desserts. Some desserts use dried fruits, oil, and semolina (halva), milk, cream, or cheese (such as kaltsounia from Crete or melopitta from Sifnos) as ingredients. They have earned great fame, and later, ready-made stacks of phyllo pastry began to be sold in stores.
Soft cakes, jam cookies, fruit tarts, and cream cakes were more recent additions to Greek patisseries, but they have now become an accepted part of modern culinary culture. One can see desserts and loukoumades (honey-drenched dough balls), galaktobouriko (custard pie), baklavas, and kadaifi (shredded wheat pastry) in every corner of Greece. Representative desserts during the Christmas season include melomakarona (honey-dipped cookies) and diples (honey-drenched fried pastries); a variant of these honey-drenched pastries found on Crete is called xerotigana.