Well, the time has finally come.......I did my first Daring Bakers challenge! For those of you not familar with the Daring Bakers, the Daring Bakers are a group of bloggers who accept a challenge once a month from a designated baker. The challenges are different every month and range for foccacia to opera cakes.I have been wanting to join the Daring Bakers for quite a while, but was afraid to take the leap. There are so many awesome bakers out there posting their beautiful pics and it made me a bit nervous to try. Well, I finally joined thinking that this would be a perfect way for me to do some of the things that I learned in school and change them to vegan. I was also hoping to be challenged to do something that I would not normally make and this challenge is exactly that.
While I absolutely do love cannolis, I have not had them since going vegan. I've never given them a shot because they are normally fried, and well, that scares me a bit. Sure, we deep fried things in school, but it was with a huge deep fryer that was made for that sort of thing! I did find a couple of recipes that allow you to bake the cannoli shells, but none of them had very good reviews. Baked cannoli shells just won't bubble and puff up like the fried ones will.
Well, I gave it a shot and ended up with some pretty freakin' tasty cannolis and no oil burns!
I followed this recipe on live journal and made a few changes:
I used Earth Balance instead of shortening and Ener-G egg replacer instead of a flax egg.
I only used 1 tsp of lemon zest and 2 tsp of lemon juice.
I added 1 TB of instant clear jel to thicken the filling. It was still pretty soft, so next time I think I will add at least 2 tablespoons of instant clear jel.
Roll out cannoli dough. If you have a pasta roller, use it! This dough takes some serious muscle to roll it out thin.
I cut the dough into circles and then rolled them into thin ovals.
Wrap the cannoli ovals around the cannoil tubes and brush the inside lip with the "egg" wash to stick together. There is a fine line on how loose/tight to wrap these around the tubes. Too tight and they will be really hard to remove from the tubes. I learned the hard way on wrapping them too loose and lost my first batch while frying.
I fried these at 375° in a canola oil for a couple of minutes. Be sure to move them around with tongs to make sure they brown evenly and don't walk away at this point! They fry up fast!
Naked cannoli shells just waiting to be filled. See all the nice bubbles?!
Candy Cane Cookies & Cream Cannolis
I left out the lemon juice & lemon zest and added a few crushed Candy Cane Trader Joe Joes Cookies to the filling. I dipped the ends in melted chocolate and more crushed cookies.
Mocha Cannolis
I left out the lemon juice and lemon zest. I added coffee extract, cocoa powder and dipped the ends in melted chocolate.
My Favorite Cannolis
I added chopped chocolate to the filling, dipped the ends in chocolate and more chopped chocolate. They were the best! A little bit of sifted powdered sugar on top would have been perfect!
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.
