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!

Buttermilk Pudding with Fresh Berries

This weekend I had to set aside some time to test recipes for the holiday party. Though much it has not been written about on this blog, the past few weeks have been a flurry of selecting and testing recipes as I assemble the final menu. A, who usually loves my baking, is actually starting to get burned out on the volume of sweets coming out of the kitchen. I keep promising him that once the holidays are over, I will make an effort to cut down on the sweets.

For much of the menu, I plan to rely a few of my most reliable recipes - marzipan cupcakes, cheesecakes, apple tarts, etc, because they all have a "comfort food" feel that should fit the New England cold. They also tend to be a little "heavy" if you eat to much at once. I needed something light and fruity to round things out. Panna cotta felt like a good place to start. Internet research led me to a recipe for berries and buttermilk pudding on Epicurious. Though not exactly panna cotta, it looked close enough.

I had never made panna cotta/pudding from scratch before. If I had known just how easy it would be, I think it would have been part of my standard repertoire. THe entire recipe, from start to finish, took less than half an hour. If you are pressed for time, you can prepare the pudding a day ahead of time, and then cook the strawberry sauce the day you plan to serve it. The Epicurious recipe claimed two be 4 servings, but I thought it was better broken down into 8 servings. For the topping, any fresh berries will do.

The pudding itself has a very light texture with a slightly tangy flavor. It should make a nice complement for the rich sweets that I plan to serve on the dessert bar.

Bagels, Homemade Mascarpone, and Olive Tapenade

Early last week, I think maybe Monday or Tuesday night, A and I had a conversation that went something like this:

A: You know, we haven't had bagels in a really long time. Maybe we should do bagels next week.
Me: I didn't know that you like bagels. I eat them all the time, but never bring them home.
A: I love bagels!
Me: Okay, I'm sure I can make bagels. I will make you some next weekend.

A paused for a moment, looking at me a little strangely.

Me: Wait, you didn't think we would buy bagels from a store did you?
A: Well... kind of?
Me: How long have we been married? You think I would buy something that I could bake and pass up the opportunity to try a new recipe?
A: I wasn't sure. Maybe?
Me: Ugh, don't worry. I won't make a mess of the kitchen.

And with that, the matter was settled. Bagels would be made for Sunday brunch.

Of course bagels alone wouldn't be enough - I needed to prepare something to put on them. It was another traveling week for A, so during the week I was left alone to play in the kitchen. Lately I have been looking into making home-made cheese (more on that in a later post) and found some easy instructions for home-made mascarpone. Perfect! Who needs Philadelphia when you can make your own Italian version.

A craving for olives helped me finish the menu. Olive tapenade would be the perfect compliment to the mascarpone and is super easy to make. Wolfgang Puck's black and green olive tapenade is my go-to recipe. It is simple and flexible. The recipe specifies picholine and Nicoise olives, but the recipe tastes just as good with any other marinated olive. I have used Kalamata and Manzanilla olives with good results. Leftover tapenade can also be turned into a puttanesca sauce... just add a sauteed onion and some canned diced tomatoes.

I turned to the Bread Baker's Apprentice for my bagel recipe. I had never baked bagels before, so I thought that Peter Reinhart's almost fool-proof recipes would be a good place to start. He provides a formula for a chewy, "New York" style bagel that is boiled first, then baked. He claims that the secret to getting the flavor right is to "alkalize" the water with baking soda before boiling the bagels.


Since it was my first try, I stuck with plain bagels. I figured I should master the plain recipe first so that I don't waste toppings and inedible product. Overall, my first bagels were a success. A enjoyed them, and told me he would never consider purchasing bagels again. I was almost satisfied (being a perfectionist can suck at times!). The internal texture and flavor was good, but the outside of the bagel was a little chewier than I would have liked. I think more research on perfecting the bagel is needed!

Meyer Lemon Macarons

I have never really been crazy about citrus flavors; orange is okay, but lemon and lime are flavors that I usually pass on when served alone. When it comes to candy, I will pick out the reds, leaving anything yellow and green behind. I am one of those red swedish fish people.

As I get older, I find myself more tolerant of the flavors. Though still not my favorite, I am willing to taste lemon or lime flavored things and even occasionally experiment with the flavors myself. I am not sure if my palette is changing, or if maybe I am making an effort since lemon and lime are two of A's favorite flavors. He has been known to polish off an entire key lime pie on his own if given the opportunity.

Over the weekend while grocery shopping, I saw meyer lemons for sale at the produce exchange. Now normally I wouldn't have noticed the lemons, or any of the citrus for that matter, as I only tend to grab the occasional lemon or lime demanded by a recipe. Over the past few weeks, I have noticed a lot of information popping up about meyer lemons on various blogs I frequent, so I have kept an eye out for them. After learning that they are sweeter and less acidic than regular lemons, I hoped that they could be the answer to my citrus aversion. Four made it into my basket, with A announcing that meyer lemon sorbet was just what he was craving. I quickly squashed those dreams and announced that meyer lemon curd would make a perfect macaron filling and that he would have to wait until another day for sorbet.

Honestly, I think my quest for the perfect macaron is making me a little nuts. I have noticed that I now judge food purely on how it might taste inside a macaron!



For the macarons, I used Tartelette's recipe, which you can find here.

I used a lemon curd recipe from Fine Cooking. I followed their recipe exactly, other than substituting 4 meyer lemons for the lemon juice they call for. Lemon curd has proven a challenge for me in the past, but this recipe seems fail proof. For some reason creaming the butter, sugar and eggs before mixing in the lemon juice seems to produce a smooth and creamy curd.

Place a dab of whipped cream on a shell followed by a dab of lemon cream. Gently sandwich the two cookies together. If you really can't wait, you can eat the macarons immediately, but I thought they tasted better after a day in the fridge.



Yum! While I don't think that meyer lemon will be a flavor I make often, I did enjoy it. A did too, though he is still grumbling about the sorbet.

This batch of macaron shells was a vast improvement over past executions. They melted in your mouth. I still had problems with air-pockets despite lowering the baking temperature to 310F. Next weekend I will try them at 300F.

Perhaps even more exciting than the macarons I baked was the arrival of my Pierre Herme cook book! Enfin! I think it only took two weeks for the book to arrive from France, but I feel like I have been waiting for ages. Maybe next weekend could be my first attempt at the "Italian" method for making macarons that he recommends... and maybe I should rename this the macaron blog!