With Felicia Mohan
Felicia Ciarmitaro Mohan readily admits that her namesake and grandmother Felicia would not approve of this recipe. She taught her how to make her first cannoli and using pumpkin as a flavoring ingredient would never be considered when making authentic and traditional cannoli from Sicily. But times change and today Felicia has taken the knowledge that has been passed down to her and is not afraid to innovate. This pumpkin cannoli is one example of her innovation.
Felicia insists that in spite of what her Grandmother would think the results in terms of taste are perfectly wonderful. Making cannoli is a lengthy, but easy process. The shell is a dough made of wheat, butter, sugar and other ingredients. It is formed into an oval, wrapped around a dough ring and fried. The shells can be filled with cream by using a spoon or pastry bag. If not served quickly, the shells will lose their crisp texture. The shells should be filled with cream immediately before serving.
It is possible to buy cannoli shells already made, which of course is a lot easier for the home cook. Felicia stays very true to the traditional recipe by using both ricotta and mascarpone cheese. Many commercial cannoli that you find today do not use the mascarpone cheese.
Ingredients
2 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
8 ounces Mascarpone cheese
3 ½ cups confectioner sugar (reserve 1/2 cup for dusting)
¾ cup can pumpkin
2 cups fresh ricotta cheese
2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
12 cannoli shells
Instructions
Step 1: Place ricotta into a bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, and beat for2-3 minutes until fluffy
Step 2: Add Mascarpone cheese and continue beating on medium high speed until cheeses are blended together
Step 3: Carefully add confectioners’ sugar and blend well
Step 4: Add vanilla extract, pumpkin, and pie spice to cannoli filling and continue beating until mixture is smooth
Step 5: Place a pastry bag fitted with a Wilton 6B tip into a large bar glass with tip end flipped upwards, resting on the bottom of the glass, and bag ends folded down over the sides of the glass
Step 6: Using a spatula fill pastry bag with pumpkin ricotta cannoli filling
Step 7: Fold each side of pastry bag in toward the center of bag and fold down top edges
Step 8: Carefully lift bag from glass and twist bag pushing filling toward the tip
Step 9: Place tip into one side of shell as close to the middle as possible and gently apply pressure to the bag to fill shell with Cannoli filling
Step 10: Arrange filled cannoli shells on a serving platter and dust with reserved confectioners’ sugar.
Enjoy!
Recipe courtesy of Felicia (Ciaramitaro) Mohan, 2011.
From "Food For Thought" Column by Heather Atwood:
Felicia Mohan lives in a sparkling new house in Gloucester, and has twin 11-year-olds: Amanda, playing 12-year-old tennis and ranked No. 32 in New England, and B.J., a catcher for AAU Baseball who will play in the Gloucester All-Star 11-year-old team. Felicia looks like a beautiful, modern mother, struggling to get her kids where they need to go while keeping up with life at home, but Felicia is also adamant about preserving her family's Sicilian heritage, particularly the dishes her grandmother, another Felicia, prepared.
Felicia Mohan's grandfathers were named Joseph Salvatore Ciaramitaro — both of them, spelled the exact same way. One Joseph fished first from his boat The Benjamin and Josephine, which was sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Maine, and then he fished from his Benjamin C, named after his father-in-law, Benjamin Cucuru. Later he founded Capt'n Joe's Lobster Co. on the wharf in Gloucester, now run by Felicia's brother, Joey, and cousin Frankie.
Felicia's other grandfather owned Pat's Center Grocery, that not only sold groceries but provided all the fishing boats with food for their long trips, delivering the "speza," as the supplies were called, to each boat before it left port.
Grandpa with the wharf was married to Felicia's namesake. Holidays at this Felicia's house began a full week ahead as all the women in the family gathered at her home, which had two full kitchens, to cook together. When school let out at 3, the children went straight to Grandma's house that week because that's where their mothers were cooking. Not only were these women making all the traditional Italian holiday foods, from appetizers such as octopus salad, a standard which the men insisted upon at every holiday, to a wealth of Italian cookies, homemade bread, and New World foods such as pies, but the women were also making ordinary dinners those weeknights for all their husbands and children.
Felicia and Joseph have passed away. Now, holiday meals are at young Felicia's, where 35 to 40 people come to celebrate. Felicia, like her grandmother, still sets a formal table with china and linen; her custom-built table seats 25, with two more tables in the great room for overflow, replacing her grandmother's enormous table that started in the kitchen, extended through the dining room, the hallway and ended at the living room.
In her large, creamy, new kitchen, Felicia still makes dishes like braciole, spiedini, and olive gonzathe. She makes videos for this newspaper showing how to prepare her grandmother's special bread crumbs, "mudiga," with chicken and steak. This past December, Felicia gathered all the cousins together to make their great-grandmother's Santa Lucia dessert, "cuccia," a vanilla pudding made with wheatberries which the playful great-grandmother had always encouraged the children to eat in a race.
Contact Heather at heatheraa@aol.com. Her blog is at gloucestertimes.com/foodforthought
