Daring Bakers in November: Vanilla and Chocolate 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 Michele Scicolone, as ingredient/direction guides. She added her own modifications/changes, so the recipe is not 100% verbatim from either book.



When it comes to desserts, my dear husband and I are flavor opposites.  He'll go for the Coupe Danemark (vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce), the chocolate mousse, the chocolate cake (with no nuts).  Are you noticing a pattern here?  He likes the classics to be exactly that - buttermilk pancakes, brownies, and chocolate chip cookies with no adaptations or tweaks! I, on the other hand, usually head straight for the most unusual and creative flavors and textures.  Lavender sorbet with hibiscus gelee, mango white chocolate bread pudding with a bourbon sauce, orange blossom water Dobos torte, and violet macarons. That's me!

Sometimes I feel a little guilty when I play around and add cinnamon to a batch of chocolate chip cookies or nutmeg to Saturday pancakes, because even if I think it's delicious it will be ruined for him.  To assuage the pangs of guilt, I made a resolution before this month's challenge was revealed: if allowed by the recipe, I would flavor it so that Matt would enjoy it.  Chocolate or vanilla, those were the choices.  How about both?  Perfect.




I like cannoli, but the whole deep frying thing puts me off of making them regularly.  The dough, made with marsala wine and cinnamon, was hard to work with and I kept having to re-roll the circles to coax them thin enough to wrap around my homemade molds.  I also couldn't get the shells to blister and bubble the way that they are supposed to - see a good example here.



I filled my shells with the traditional sweetened ricotta mixture, adding the seeds of a scraped vanilla bean to one half and some melted dark couverture chocolate to the other.  The chocolate was divine - slightly tangy from the ricotta and richly chocolate-y, good enough to serve on its own as a mousse, and even better in the crunchy shell.



True to his taste, Matt murmured appreciatively about the chocolate or vanilla with each bite in the hopes that I'd get the hint and promise to make everything only chocolate or vanilla the future. No such luck! Next month: back to my regularly scheduled weird adventurous flavors!