The 2009 November Daring Bakers Challenge: Cannoli!

The November 2009 Daring Bakers Challenge was chosen and hosted by Lisa Michele of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives. She chose the Italian Pastry, Cannolo (Cannoli is plural), using the cookbooks Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and The Sopranos Family Cookbook by Allen Rucker; recipes by Michelle Scicolone, as ingredient/direction guides. She added her own modifications/changes, so the recipe is not 100% verbatim from either book.


I honestly had no idea what to expect from the November challenge. Thinking about what I usually bake in November, I had vague expectations of something involving pumpkin... or maybe apples... or cloves... something Thanksgiving-y. Imagine my surprise when I saw that I would be learning to make cannolis this month! I often forget that the rest of the world doesn't equate November with pumpkin pie and turkey!

So cannolis are both easy and difficult at the same time. I only tried the recipe once and had no trouble. I ended up with mediocre cannolis. (A loved them... but maybe just because I made them?) That said, in testing my results and working through the recipe, I think that a few simple changes would have yielded a much better final product.


The shells were crisp enough and the flavor was good, but I did not get the light, flaky, blistery texture that you find in the shells at good Italian bakeries. I think I may not have rolled my dough out enough, but if anyone has any other ideas, I would welcome them.


Here are a few things I learned while making the shells:

1. This is a very stiff dough. I read that you can use a pasta machine to roll it out thinly enough, but this did not work for me. I may not have put enough liquid into the dough, as it started to crumble and fall apart after the first run through the pasta machine. I switched to a rolling pin, but at this point the dough had gotten so stiff that I had trouble getting it to stay where I rolled it - the gluten kept snapping back.

2. I think the marsala wine and cinnamon combination is the key to the shell's flavor. I know that you can use other wines, but I was very pleased with the way the marsala tasted and would recommend sticking with it.

3. These shells fry quickly! If you don't pay attention, they will burn. My first four shells were black when I pulled them out of the fryer. I cooked them in canola oil because it is what I had on hand. Maybe another type of oil would be better?


4. Try to pull the shells off of the cannoli forms immediately. The faster the better, because if you let them sit for too long, they stick.

For the filling, I decided to make a standard ricotta based cannoli cream with some pistachio paste and mini-chocolate chips mixed in for additional flavor. The filling was a piece of cake - mix the ingredients together and simply pipe it into the cannoli shell.

A loved the enough that he insisted they should be added to the menu for the Salem holiday party. I will be making cannoli again. Thanks again to the Daring Bakers for picking a great recipe and forcing me out of my baking comfort zone!