The ultimate Italian pastry, we chose to flavour ours with chocolate and pistachio.



So this week was Italian week, and it was full of amazing treats, as much as we may love pizza, we couldn’t resist the call of the cannoli. We’ve been dying to make these for a while, although were very glad we weren’t in the hot tent the bakers had to suffer in this episode! The sfogliatelle looked like a challenge we want to take on but we’ve saved the intricate pastry work they involve for another day!


Yan’s time to leave has come, and we’re sad, she bought pure joy to our screens. Never mind that we will no longer be kept up to date on how her scooter accident, chin scab is healing! Star baker went to Steven who is definitely back on top form after a dodgy couple of weeks, although we felt Sophie really stole the show this week (we were even tempted to follow suit and commit Italian blasphemy by using mascarpone). We’re unsure of what next week’s forgotten bakes will involve but with it being the quarter final it’s sure to be an interesting one!!


Having never tried making these before, this as a bit of an experiment for us, they are a little fussy to make but not too tricky at all. And if you don’t have the correct cannoli moulds, fear not, neither did we! We shaped some homemade ones out of baking parchment wrapped in foil that did the job perfectly! The navigating of hot oi is a little more tricky to do but we managed to escape with relatively few burns! We have a deep fat fryer which makes it much easier to cook these as we don’t have to worry about monitoring and controlling the temperature. You can still make these in a pan of oil if you don’t have a fryer just make sure to keep a close eye on how they are cooking so you don’t end up with any burnt cannoli!



After we had fried our shells we dipped each end of the pastry in dark chocolate and then some chopped pistachios, this adds both more flavour and some texture to the cannoli. For our filling, we blitzed pistachios until really fine so we could pack in their flavour but still have a smooth creamy centre to our cannoli! We stuck to the traditional ricotta based filling, but if you whip it for a minute or 2 it gets nice and smooth so make sure to do this step! We used an open star tip to pipe our filling as we love the look it gives, the ricotta gives the filling very good shape holding ability so it works well we think!


Oh is that another amazing design from Pig and Fig?! Why we believe it is! this gorgeous apron has pheasants and scotch eggs on it guys… scoth eggs! we couldn’t find a more perfect apron for us if we tried!


We cannoli hope Paul would have been impressed with these.

Pistachio and Chocolate Cannoli

Yields 25


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For the shells
  1. 275g plain flour
  2. 1 tbsp sugar
  3. 50g butter
  4. 1 egg yolk
  5. 120ml dry white wine
  6. 1l oil for frying
For the filling
  1. 400g ricotta
  2. 100ml double cream
  3. 100g icing sugar
  4. 70g shelled pistachios
To decorate
  1. 30g shelled pistachios, roughly chopped
  2. 100g dark chocolate
To make the shells
  1. Add the flour, sugar and butter to a bowl and rub together with your fingers until you reach a bread crumb consistency.
  2. Add in the egg yolk and wine and mix together until you have a smooth dough.
  3. In a deep fryer or pan, heat your oil to 180C.
  4. Working in batches, roll out a quarter at a time to about 1-2mm thick and cut out 4 inch circles.
  5. Wrap a circle around the mould, using egg wash to stick the 2 sides together.
  6. Gently place into the oil, using tongs if necessary, and fry for 2-3 mins until golden brown on all sides.
  7. Remove from the oil and holding the cannoli with kitchen roll, use tongs to pull out the mould, then set aside to cool. Repeat until you’ve used all your dough, you should make about 25.
  8. Once cooled, melt you chocolate and dip in each end of the cannoli, then dip into the chopped pistachios.
For the filling
  1. Add the icing sugar and pistachios to a food processor and blitz until very fine.
  2. Using an electric whisk or in a stand mixer, whisk the ricotta until smooth.
  3. In a separate bowl, whisk the cream until it begins to stiffen, then whisk in the pistachio and icing sugar until fully incorporated.
  4. Fold the ricotta into the rest of the filling mixture.
  5. Spoon the filling into a piping bag fitted with an open star nozzle and pipe filling into each end of the cannoli.
Notes
  1. Cannoli don’t keep well so serve immediately!
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