Original Recipe: http://gracessweetlife.com/2010/06/cannoli-siciliani-the-ultimate-italian-pastry/
Well, things kinda worked out. The recipe appears to be sound, but not cooking with alcohol meant using grape juice instead. I’m not sure if that had anything to do with it. I also didn’t have proper cannoli molds. (I’m in the middle of nowhere and things take forever to get to us.) I instead used wooden dowels, which worked OK after being fried a couple of times, but it took some work to get the cannolis off the mold the first few times, plus they float, so I had to use the basket to hold them under the oil. I think we overcooked most of the shells, too. The pastry was good, but wasn’t as tasty as I expected (but this is the first time I’ve ever attempted cannoli). The bubbles were also much larger than what Graces pictures show. In some cases the bubbles blocked the centres from being filled. The filling was excellent, though! I didn’t take any pictures because I’m just not happy with how they turned out. I’ll do some more research and will try this again another time.
Yield: It’s amazing how thin you can roll out this dough. I was sure we wouldn’t get more than 6–8 out of the dough, but we were heading to the 16–20 mark before we just stopped. You would absolutely have to double the filling recipe to fill 28 cannolis. I was using dowels over an inch in diameter, 4.5 inches circumference, and just over 5 inches long.
Verdict: The jury is still out.