Gluten Free Cannoli Cups

After our amazing Valentine's Day dinner, I had a lot of leftover ricotta cheese. Naturally, I began searching for new recipes to test out utilizing this ingredient - And some of the first recipes I found were for cannoli. To be honest, I have only had a true cannoli a few times in my whole life. Regardless, I know how delicious these Italian desserts are so I decided to use my snow day from work to bake an easier version of the traditional cannoli. Instead of trying to fry my own cannoli shells, I turned this dessert into bite size cups filled with delectable ricotta cream.

When I made these this morning, I ended up making 2 batches of the crusts because I had SO much extra ricotta cream filling. To make things easier for you I doubled the original recipe so you should have a much more even proportion of filling to crusts, with an extra couple spoonfuls to enjoy yourself.

Gluten Free Cannoli Cups

Adapted from The Low Carb Diet
Yield: 36 bite-size cups

Ingredients

For the crusts**

4 cups almond flour
1/2 cup coconut flour
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup pure maple syrup
1 cup almond milk
1/2 cup coconut oil, melted
2 eggs (or egg substitute - I used 2 Neat Eggs)
Semisweet chocolate chips, for garnishing

For the filling

1 1/4 cups ricotta cheese (preferably whole milk and grassfed)
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 Tablespoons semisweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup coconut nectar (or pure maple syrup)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350°F (use the convection setting on your oven if you have that option).
In a large bowl, mix together all crust ingredients until thoroughly combined. The mixture should be thick and doughy.
Grease the tins of two mini muffin pans with coconut oil.
Press enough dough into each muffin tin to almost fill the tin to the top. Use your fingers to make a large indent in the middle, forming a cup shape. *Note: You can make the crusts as thick or thin as you prefer, but if you want to make them much thinner than the picture below reduce the baking time by a few minutes and check on them often to ensure they do not burn.
If desired, drop 2 chocolate chips into each cup before baking.
Bake the crusts for 15-18 minutes, or until the edges begin to turn golden brown.
Remove from the oven and place crusts on a rack to cool completely before filling with the ricotta cream.
To make the ricotta cream, place all ingredients for the filling in a food processor or blender and blend until the ricotta becomes creamy and the chocolate chips have been processed into small pieces.
Place the ricotta cream filling in the fridge until the crusts have cooled completely.
Once cooled, pipe the ricotta cream filling into each cup and top with 2 chocolate chips.*

*If you do not have a tool for piping, you can make your own by slightly cutting off the corner of a sandwich sized ziploc bag and filling with the cream mixture to pipe.

**For a nut-free version, simply replace the almond and coconut flours with 4 cups of all-purpose gluten free flour blend, such as Bob's Red Mill