Sfogliatelle, Cannoli, Pate Sablee, Pate Brise, Pasta Frolla, Orange Curd AND Frangipane -- No Wonder I'm Tired!

Dear faithful blog readers...So sorry to have been absent these past couple days; I was feeling a little under the weather and believe it or not, this blog is a lot of work so I was trying to put a little more effort into resting and less into blogging. So sorry for the absence.

The past couple days at school have been full of little pastries and pie and tart doughs. Yesterday we made a fancy-pants Italian pastries called sfogliatelle (my Italian friend informed me that you say this s-fog-la-tell) and it was a rather intensive process. We used a pasta machine and made the dough paper thin, covered it with butter AND lard and then stretched the dough and rolled it into a fat lard-soaked log. We then cut the log into pieces and used our hands to make little baskets or nests (apparently sfogliatelle means little nests in Italian) that we then filled with a ricotta, sugar, candied orange and cinnamon filling. Then we baked the sfogliatelle and all the rolling that we did looked like little lifted layers when they came out of the oven. Collin Murray loved these when they were warm because they were quite soft, but when they cooled, the were rather crunchy. Still, they were beautiful and I cannot believe that I actually made them because they look so fancy.


This is a bad picture but the best one I had of the log after it was cut. All the layers in the dough are from us rolling it up. We took these little disks and used our fingers to push them into little cone shapes that we then filled with the ricotta filling.


When we baked the sfogliatelle, they puffed up and looked very purty


Lots of little sfogliatelles -- Look at all the layers!

We also made cannoli yesterday and they were very picky and fickle. The cannoli dough was rolled with the pasta machine until very thin and then cut with cookie cutters and rolled over cannoli tubes (basically just little metal tubes). The tubes were then deep-fried and when they cooled, we filled them with a ricotta, sugar, cinnamon, candied oranges and chocolate. The reason that they were fickle is that the dough had to be rolled paper thin but it was a very flimsy dough so it was hard to get it just right and also, it was difficult to know when they were done frying because you wanted them to be cooked through but not overdone and it was a balance that our group just didn't quite master.


My three best cannoli -- one is dipped in chopped pistachios, one in chocolate and one in candied orange rind just for decoration


A close-up of the orange-rind cannoli

Today we made three types of dough for pies and tarts -- pasta frolla, pate brise and pate sablee. We also made orange curd which was very tasty and deserving of its own blog post because it was also very easy and something that I think everyone could easily learn. We also made pistachio frangipane. I'm not entirely sure what frangipane is yet. Chef said that it can be used to make tarts as a filling but it can also be used as a dough itself. We shall see. Other people made almond frangipane or walnut but our pistachio one, that you will likely see tomorrow, was tasty and had a really pretty pale green color.

So tomorrow, though I'm not entirely sure, I think we are going to be working on fruit tarts. Whatever it is though, it's not bread and for that I am very thankful because the carb intoxication was taking its tole on Collin Murray and I.