Cannoli – November 2009 Daring Bakers

It’s with much pleasure that I can tell you I’ve re-joined the Daring Bakers group! I have missed taking part in their monthly baking events, and am happy that my timetable hopefully now means that I can take part once again.

This months event was chosen by by Lisa Michele of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives. She chose the Italian Pastry Cannolo (or cannoli if there is more than one). I have heard of them before in some of my Italian and American cookbooks. They are a deep fried dough shell filled with something creamy. I couldn’t help thinking of brandy snaps when I saw the pictures, or even my own when they were made. They are nothing like brandy snaps though, the dough being flavoured with cinnamon and Marsala wine.

The dough is pretty hard to work with, horrible to knead and getting it through the pasta machine the first few times was not east at all! If you persevere though it does become something more pliant and manageable, that can indeed be formed into cannoli. There was several stages to the making of this months challenge, the dough, rolling and shaping the dough, deep frying the shells, chocolate and nut dipping the ends, then the filling of the otherwise ready shells before being ready to eat them.

Lisa Michelle gave up the options of forming them into the traditional cylinder shells by using forms or just cutting out shapes from the dough. Not one to pass up the opportunity to buy a little bit of kitchen kit I purchased a couple of forms online =) So here you have then Cannoli. I filled mine with whipped cream flavoured with Amaretto liqueur and a little icing (confectioners) sugar, which reflected the chopped almonds in the chocolate shells. I did like them, they were very pretty, I’m not sure I’d make them again though, as I hardly ever deep fry anything, last time I used my machine would be about 10 years ago! I’m glad I did give them a go though, once the naughty dough was behaving it was a fun challenge. Thanks to Lisa Michelle for choosing. Please click here for the recipe if you fancy giving them a go.