Making Cannoli

There were not too many ingredients necessary to make cannoli, mainly the sugar, ricotta cheese and chocolate for the filling, the cannoli tubes, and some orange or lemon liquor for the shells.  I got some cointreau since I wanted some anyway, but I'm sure a cheaper liquor would have worked fine.

Following the recipe for the shells, it was clear that there were too little liquid to form a dough.

When the dough came out of the fridge it was too crumbly.  So I ended up adding several additional tablespoons of liquor, until the mixture seemed wet enough to combine, then putting the dough back in the fridge, until it formed into something I can roll out.

I had a pasta maker and it proved invaluable in rolling the dough out to a thin and even thickness.  I rolled the dough out until it fit the widest setting in the pasta maker, then kept feeding it through, reducing the setting on each pass, until I had sheets that were less than 1/8" thick.  I then used a plastic 4" lid to cut out circles.  Most of the extra dough I recombined and fed it through the pasta maker again, and re-cut circles.  This did not seem to affect the taste in the final shells.

While the dough was resting in the fridge, I made the ricotta filling.  Very simple, just combining the chocolate (food processed to tiny chips), orange peel and sugar.  The recipe said to drain the ricotta cheese before, which I did, but almost no liquid came out.  I think perhaps there's a "fresh" ricotta with lots of water that was different from the grocery store kind I got.

Since I had much chocolate left, I also made a second filling of italian chocolate pastry cream using this recipe:

http://www.mangiabenepasta.com/creampuffs.html

I used pastry cream portion with the chocolate variation.  In the end, I actually preferred this chocolate filling over the ricotta, but it's not very traditional.

Wrapping the tubes and frying the shells came next.  I made sure each shell was securely on each tube, and that the end of the tubes were exposed.  I used a medium sauce pan large enough to fit the tubes, and filled it with several inches of oil.  I heated the oil until around 370, and fried one shell at a time, for about one minute.  I used tongs to hold each end of the tube and lower them in the oil.  Then placed them on a rack to drain.  After about 5 minutes, when the shell and tube are cool enough to handle, I took the shells off.  This required a surprising amount of force, but I found that grabbing the shell and twisting the tube usually worked.  Luckily there were only a few cracks and crumbles and no catastrophic shell breaks.

Finally, filling the shells with a pastry bag went pretty smoothly.  Filling each shell from both ends works well.  Dip one end in some crushed pistachio nuts, dust some powdered sugar on top, and the cannoli are ready to enjoy!