The Cannoli Tower...YUM!!!!

My gorgeous friend Helen found a picture of a seriously impressive cannoli tower online and asked if anyone wanted to help her to make one. It looked pretty damn good to me so I put my hand up.

Neither of us really looked into what it entailed until the day before when I was shopping for the ingredients and read through the instructions. Even then, we had no idea that the whole thing would take almost all day to make!

Most recipes called for the use of metal cannoli tubes to make the pastry shells, but not being in an area with a handy Italian cookware store, I had to find an alternative. So I kept looking and found a recipe that suggested using wrapping the pastry shells around canneloni pasta tubes whilst they were deep fried. Perfect!

We started out making the custard, half vanilla and half choc as we'd seen in the lovely little patisseries. We followed this recipe from Master Chefette which worked out well:  http://www.themasterchefette.com/2012/12/cannoli-with-crema-di-pasticceria.html

Then for the pastry cases. We followed this recipe by Kim D on food.com: http://www.food.com/recipe/cannoli-95546
....however, we found that there was about another half a cup of white wine necessary to make the mixture look like anything approaching pastry. We popped it in the fridge to cool and had lunch.

We found another good suggestion online, using a pasta machine to roll out the pastry. Since I had one handy, we set it up and started to cut out the rounds.

....then we had to wrap them around canneloni shells, making sure that they were thoroughly floured, or they stuck to the pasta once cooked.

So, yes, there was wine used in the pastry and that isn't oil the cases are deep frying in, it's lard... aka pig fat...yep, serious health food here.

We had to let the pastry cases cool a little before attempting to take out the canneloni tubes.

We cooled them on a rack before piping in the custard and....

VOILA!! A delicious cannoli tower....at about 5pm! Phew!! What an effort :)