November's Daring Bakers Challenge---Cannoli

So....if you happen to be a Daring Baker who happens to peruse the DB forum quite a bit, you would know that I completed my challenge early this month. Whaa..? Hang on, am I not the incorrigible procrastinator that you knew me to be? I am, actually. But not on Cannoli month.

I actually made, assmbled, and photographed my cannoli a few days before the deadline, and if you have access to the DB forum and take a look at the 'Share Completed Challenges' section for November, you can see my version of Cannoli right there, along with an explanation which states that I will be switching internet providers around the time of the posting date, and will therefore be posting late due to the interruption of internet connectivity.

The above is partly true. I was telling the truth when I said that I was switching providers, but no when I said that there was interruption. Because believe it or not, the transition was smoother than I expected, in spite of a few glitches along the way. Now that my internet speed is brought up to this century, I can hopefully take the time I used to spend twiddling my fingers in front of the computer waiting for the pages to load up, and turn it productive blogging hours. I don't even need to take a magazine with me anymore to the computer---this is great!!
I decided to bake my cannoli this month because baked cannoli = less time cleaning up. And I HATE oil stains. I mean, I can't suffer as little as a drop on anything in the kitchen. I'm sure deep frying them is the way to go, and as much as I love anything battered and deep-fried, I am not yet willing to subject my entire kitchen surface to a thin coating of cooking oil.

But moving on to the business at hand...the cannoli...I wanted something light and easy to eat to combat the November heatwave in Melbourne. As I did not have time to plan this dessert very well, I took a look inside my fridge and found, among other things, a half-tub of sheep's milk yogurt and some tinned peaches. Wait now, what? Ah, the shame. Yes, ladies and gentlemen readers of my blog, I eat tinned peaches. But please do not judge me. What are you to do when you are faced with an incessant and insistent craving for peaches, went to the market and bough a couple, only to find, hopes dashed and love lost, that the peaches are sour and tasteless. Blame it on the early season, or blame it on commercial growers who sacrificed taste for mass production, or even blame my local farmers' markets for not having it in stock yet.

But it was good. A hint of tangy sweetness from the yogurt mousse, the delectable taste of sweet peaches, and the crunch of the thin sheets of cannoli, layered into something resembling, but not quite, a millefeuille.

I enjoyed every last bit of it.

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.