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.
Better late than never, I guess! Unfortunately, I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off this week and have been unable to blog about my latest Daring Baker challenge. I actually had all good intentions of blogging last night, but we lost power for 3+ hours, so that idea was shot as well.
So, I was really concerned when I heard that the Daring Bakers were making cannoli this month. I have a fear of deep-frying and thought this would be the most difficult challenge ever. To my shock, this was a very easy challenge, and I'm looking forward to making more cannoli. My only problem was that my ricotta cheese filling was a little watery. I could not find any cheesecloth at the grocery store, and thought paper coffee filters would be an acceptable substitute for draining the ricotta cheese. Unfortunately, it didn't work as well as I thought, so I had a yucky watery layer on top of my ricotta filling. I also used less sugar than the ricotta filling recipe called for because I didn't want an overly sweet cannoli. I actually went too far in the other extreme - my cannoli could have been a touch sweeter for my taste.
Here are my pictures:
Here is the cannoli dough prior to kneading. Yes, it's a purpley-red color due to the wine in the dough!
The rolled-out cannoli dough. I think next time I might try to make actual chocolate dough.
Raw cannoli ready to go into the pot of oil.
The cannoli deep-frying. It'd deep-fried dough, what else can you want?
Freshly fried cannoli cooling for a moment.
Pan of cannoli just waiting for a filling!
The ricotta filling all ready to go. It was still delicious despite being a bit watery!
Fresh filled cannoli with a few extra chocolate chips. They were really good, just could have been a bit sweeter!
The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macaroons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.
OK, so here is my first attempt at the The Daring Baker challenges. See http://www.thedaringkitchen.com for details - pretty much, you are assigned a recipe for the month, and must make that recipe, take pictures and post a blog about said recipe. This month's recipe was for French macaroons with filling. I decided to do class almond macaroons with a mocha ganache filling.
For full instructions on French macaroons, please see the front page of The Daring Kitchen. I'm just going to highlight my experience with the macaroons.
The first part of the recipe was to whip egg whites and fold in a combination of almond flour and confectioner's sugar. Here is what the batter looked like after doing so:
The batter was then piped onto Silpats and baked in a cool oven for 5 minutes, removed from the oven, and then baked in a hot oven for 7 - 8 minutes. I found that I had to bake my macaroons a little longer than the instructions said in order to get a firm, non-sticky cookie. Since it had been years since I had worked with a pastry bag and tips, I also had a helluva time piping the cookies - it wasn't until my very last batch that I had pretty looking cookies. This is what the cookies looked like going into the oven:
The macaroons after being baked:
After the cookies were baked and cooled, it was time to fill them! I decided to do a mocha ganache because (a) it's super easy and (b) I LOVE ganache. All I did was heat 1 cup heavy whipping cream on the stove until it bubbled around the edges (NOT boiling) and poured it over 8 oz of chopped chocolate and 1 teaspoon espresso powder. I stirred until smooth and chilled in the refrigerator for about two hours. Here is a picture of the completed and filled French macaroons:
The recipe made many more macaroons than this, but there were the ones that I actually got a picture of! The true French macaroon is supposed to have a "foot" at the bottom (see the picture at The Daring Kitchen) however I tried two different techniques to get a foot at the bottom of my cookie and was unsuccessful both times. I look forward to trying this recipe again, possibly adding different flavors to both the macaroon and to the filling.
Here is the cannoli dough prior to kneading. Yes, it's a purpley-red color due to the wine in the dough!
The rolled-out cannoli dough. I think next time I might try to make actual chocolate dough.
Raw cannoli ready to go into the pot of oil.
The cannoli deep-frying. It'd deep-fried dough, what else can you want?
Freshly fried cannoli cooling for a moment.
Pan of cannoli just waiting for a filling!
The ricotta filling all ready to go. It was still delicious despite being a bit watery!
Fresh filled cannoli with a few extra chocolate chips. They were really good, just could have been a bit sweeter!
