Cannoli
I'm not really sure why I'm doing this post other than that in the last few days I keep coming across cannoli here and there. I'm not likely to make any either. Bad for you on two counts - the pastry is deep fried and the filling is full of cheese and sugar!
So just a brief post to tell you what they are, where they come from, give you a recipe and tell you where you can get the best ones in Melbourne.
They are Sicilian but brought there by the Arabs who introduced sugar cane to the island back in the middle ages. They made a sweet by wrapping pastry around the sugar cane, frying it and filling it with sweet things. Today Sicily remains the cannoli champion. Basically you make a dough, roll it around a mould and then deep fry. Fill the fried rolls with a cream made of ricotta (should be sheep's milk ricotta), flavoured with sugar and things like candied peel, and nuts. If you can't get hold of a mould - I bet you would have to go to a specialist shop to find them - unless Aldi has them every now and then - it's the sort of thing they would have - if you haven't got a mould I found recipes that suggested using dried cannelloni tubes as your mould. Of course you would have to throw away the cannelloni tubes when you were done, but this would be cheaper I would think.
The filling is obviously up to you really. The Americans love chocolate apparently. No surprises there. And it doesn't have to be ricotta, although mascarpone is not recommended for some reason. But some recipes seem to go for a crème patissière kind of filling.
As for where to get the best cannoli in Melbourne - well opinion seems to be mostly in favour of Footscray - at T. Cavallero and Sons - a humble little bakery that was founded by yet another of those enterprising post-war Italian immigrants, and which is still run by his son (the little boy in the first picture - and the man in the last) and other family members.
The runner up seems to be Brunetti, which, I noticed seems to have an outpost in Singapore these days. We mostly go to the one in Lygon Street. Their coffee is excellent, and apparently so are their cannoli, although I did see one Trip Advisor comment moaning about overpriced and not very good. There's always one isn't there? It looks pretty nice to me.
So there you have it - cannoli - the Italian version of brandy snaps from England, as well as vanilla slices I guess, though they are not rolls - and also let's not forget éclairs from France. Same concept - a roll of pastry with a gooey sweet something in the middle.
As I said, I don't think I shall be making any. And maybe I won't come across any more now.
