Vegan Cannoli

Today’s recipe will leave your jaw on the floor! Get ready for this Vegan Cannoli recipe! The most perfect, crispy eggless cannoli shells, a delicious creamy vegan cannoli filling!

These Vegan Cannoli were some of the best pastries to ever come out of my kitchen.

I am a huge cannoli fan. You can find my regular (non-vegan) Cannoli Recipe here. It was one of my first recipes that I’ve ever published when I started my blog.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to reshoot that recipe, and update it with new pictures. But since Vegan Desserts seems to be an ongoing theme over here at Pies and Tacos, I thought what if I made a vegan cannoli variation instead?

So let’s talk about those vegan cannoli shells.

These are egg free cannoli shells. There’s usually butter, and eggs in the cannoli shell. Here we go without the eggs to make ours. And they turned out WAY better than I ever expected. It was like I was eating the traditional one I always make! I couldn’t tell the difference! Guys, I am telling you! Try this recipe for cannoli shells with no eggs! You will be so happy with your shells!

You can use water, or wine to make the shells. Typically, people use white wine, or Marsala wine. I used sparkling water on my dough.

But any liquid would work.

Wine tends to produce crispier results.

Tips for making Vegan Cannoli Shells from scratch:

• Don’t knead the dough too much, or add too much flour to it. You don’t want the final result to be a tough pastry. You want it to be light and crispy.
• Let the dough rest in the fridge, preferably overnight. This will allow for the liquid to be absorbed fully by the flour, making the dough smooth as the gluten formations settle.
• Use a pasta machine, if possible, to help you roll out the dough. You want to get the dough very thin, so you don’t end up with chewy cannoli shells. You can use elbow grease and roll them out yourself, just make sure they are as thin as possible.
• Use a thermometer to control the grease temperature as you fry the cannoli shells. If the temperature gets too hot, your shells will start to burn.
• I recommend cutting out as many circles as possible, and keeping them covered so they don’t dry out, as you wrap the cannoli tubes and fry the shells.

I cut my circles with a 3.5″ cookie cutter.

You can choose a smaller size, if you want small cannoli, but this size makes for a 3-4 bites cannoli.

And these are the tubes I use. I have 2 sets, which helps speed thing up, since I can wrap, and quickly fry a bunch at once.

This is a set by Norpro and I’ve had it and used it for years, and they are still great! Totally recommend them!

Fry shells for about 1-2 minutes on each side. Making sure to control the temperature of the grease, so it doesn’t get too hot.

I used shortening to fry my vegan cannoli shells.

As you can see, I chose to top my vegan cannoli with melted chocolate and fresh raspberries. You have tones of options. You can make this vegan cannoli recipe your own.

Vegan Cannoli Flavors:

You can coat the sides of the cannoli with chocolate chips, or chopped pistachios.

Also, you can dip the ends of the vegan cannoli shells in chocolate, let the chocolate dry, and then fill the shells with the filling.

You can sprinkle powdered sugar on top of the cannoli instead of the melted chocolate and fresh raspberries.

You can leave the raspberries out of the filling, and add other chopped berries, chocolate chips, espresso powder, any essence, or flavorings of your choice. The recipe is very basic and it will welcome any alterations. But it will also be delicious if plain! That’s the beauty of it. Those crispy bites of cannoli will be memorable to you, and anyone who tries these Vegan Cannoli, whether they are vegan or not.

If you enjoy vegan recipes, you might want to check some of these out!

• Vegan Raspberry Macarons
• Vegan Cookie Sandwiches
• Lavender Lemon Vegan Macarons
• Vegan Strawberry Cheesecake
• Avocado Vegan Macarons
• Beet Vegan Cheesecake
• Vegan Salted Caramel Macarons
• Vegan Blueberry Pineapple Donuts

I hope you enjoyed my Vegan Cannoli recipe! Thank you for reading! Have a great day everyone!

Vegan Cannoli

This is a recipe for Vegan Cannoli. This one is flavored with Lemon and Raspberry, but you can easily make any variation you want. You will fall in love with the crispy vegan cannoli shells, I guarantee! Enjoy!

5 from 4 votes

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Prep Time 2 hours hrs 10 minutes mins

Cook Time 45 minutes mins

Total Time 2 hours hrs 50 minutes mins

Course Dessert

Cuisine Italian, vegan

Servings 40 cannoli

Calories 290 kcal

Ingredients

  

Vegan Cannoli Shells

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
• 2 tablespoons oil of choice I used avocado oil
• 1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
• 1/2 cup water*

Vegan Cannoli Filling

• 1 cup raw cashews
• 1/2 lb extra firm tofu drained
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste or vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons coconut cream
• 1 tablespoon vegan sour cream
• 1 tablespoon lemon zest
• 1 cup powdered sugar

Instructions

 

Vegan Cannoli Shells

• Mix flour, sugar, salt in a bowl.
• Mix oil, apple cider vinegar, and water in a cup.
• Pour liquids over dry ingredients.
• Mix with a spatula or paddle attachment of your mixer until ingredients have formed a dough.
• Switch to dough hook and start kneading until soft and smooth, about 2 minutes, or knead by hand for a few minutes. Add more flour as necessary, if dough seems too sticky. But try to add as little as possible.
• Once the dough is smooth, flatten it out a bit into a disk. Wrap it well with plastic wrap and refrigerate dough for a few hours, at least 4, or preferably overnight.
• On the next day, remove the dough from the fridge. You can roll dough out by hand or with the use of a pasta roller. No matter what method you use, divide the dough into 6 pieces and roll them out individually to make it easier. With my pasta machine, I roll the dough through the machine once on every number and stop on number 5. Flour your counter and sprinkle flour over the dough. Don’t use too much flour, just enough to handle the dough easily so it doesn’t stick to the counter when you are trying to cut the circles.
• Cut circles with your biscuit cutter. I used a 3.5” cutter.
• I usually roll all of my 6 pieces of dough out, cut circles out of them. Roll out the dough scrapes and do the same. And you can roll out these second scrapes once again to obtain a few more circles.
• Once you have all your circles cut you can start wrapping them around your cannoli tubes and frying them. (or if you are crazy like me, you can fry the shells and roll the dough out at the same time, but get ready to move fast)
• To wrap tubes, place each in the middle of a dough circle, roll out the bottom half and lightly dip your finger in water and brush where will be the seam so the other side will seal. Don’t wrap your tubes too tight or you will have a hard time removing the shell after frying. Just make it a tad looser.
• Heat 4 cups of shortening in a large pan with a heavy bottom until it registers 350F. Start frying the cannoli in batches. Fry for one minute on one side and then flip it over with tongs. Once the cannoli is golden brown, remove to a tray lined with wire so the cannoli will drain. If you are lucky like me, you have several tubes and that makes life easier. If not, wait a couple of minutes before removing the shell from the tube after fried. And go on wrapping more until you are done. Wrapping, frying, wrapping, frying. Once shells are cool, place them in an air-tight container, they will keep for 3 days, but start to loose quality the longer they sit.

Vegan Cannoli Filling

• This filling is based on this recipe by Oh my veggies. https://ohmyveggies.com/vegan-cannoli-bites/
• Soak cashews in water overnight, or in hot water for a couple of hours.
• Drain and squeeze them lightly to remove all water once they are done soaking.
• Make sure to drain tofu really well. Squeeze it between a cheesecloth if necessary to help remove all the water.
• Place cashews in the food processor. Pulse for about 30 seconds. Add tofu, lemon juice, vanilla bean paste, coconut cream, sour cream to the food processor. Process for a few minutes until mixture becomes creamy and smooth.
• If mixture seems too runny add more powdered sugar.
• Place it in a container and refrigerate for a couple of hours until the mixture is firm.
• Right before serving, I added some fresh raspberries to the cannoli filling, and then scooped it into a pastry bag. Or you can just keep your filling plain without the raspberries if you want to.

To assemble

• Don’t assemble until you are ready to serve or serve within the next few hours because if you let the filled cannoli sit, the shell gets soggy. I like to keep the filling in a piping bag inside my fridge and the shells stored in an airtight container on my counter. When ready to serve to my lucky guests, I simply pipe the filling in. Fresh, crispy and delicious! Perfection!
• I like to use a large round piping tip (around 1/2” inch) fitted in a large piping bag. Scoop the filling in and pipe from the middle to the outside from both sides.
• You can coat the tips in crushed pistachios, or any other nuts or in mini chocolate chips.
• Another option is to dip the ends of the shells into melted chocolate and let them dry for a while and once the chocolate is dry, fill with the filling.
• Sprinkle powdered sugar over shells for the final touch, or drizzle with melted chocolate.

Notes

*I used sparkling water in my vegan cannoli shells. You can use whatever you want, traditionally, you’d use wine, and you can go for that too!

*Wine will produce a much crisper shell than using water. If using wine, replace the water and vinegar with the same amount of wine (1/2 cup + 1 tsp).

 

Keyword cannoli