Sfogliatelles with Ricotta Walnut and Raisins

I have been cooking a lot of Italian food, or Italian influenced food.

Our family love Italian food, especially children, and we have a lot of Italian families around us.  When we get to another birthday party - the friends of our children, we get more Italian food and get more Italian recipes.

And some of them have been accepted by the Italians, when hubby brought them to work.  Including the Italian Potato Donuts, Cannolis, so I said to hubby, time to re-visit some of the old time favourites and bring them to work, see if the Italians at work will OK them as well...

So, time to do Sfogliatelles.  The little pastry wrapped sweets filled with ricotta ...

However, I made an almost fatal mistake, about the timing.  Anyway, this is this batch of Sfogliatelles:

I didn't change the pastry dough quantity:

Ingredients



Dough
500g plain flour
50g sugar
1 tsp salt
80g water
80g milk
1 large egg

The dough was mixed, and rested for more than 3 hours, and rolled out and stretched, bit like how I'd do filo pastry, make it thinner and then brush melted butter on each later, roll it up like a long log.

Normally, I'd wrap it up in cling form and rest it for an hour as per original recipe suggests. 
However, because I was very tired that night and decided to leave it in the fridge over night, and make the filling the next day.

The Filling:
75g thickened cream

75g milk
60g sugar
50g semolina
150g Ricotta
1 egg yolk
1 whole egg
Zest of 2 lemons
1/3 cup of crushed and roasted walnuts
1/3 cup of raisins
1 vanilla pod, sliced open and seed scrapped out.

Bring the cream, sugar, vanilla and milk to a slow boil and set aside and discard the vanilla pod. 

Whisk the egg and the yolk, stir in the warm mixture, return to the small saucepan and add in semolina.  Once thickened and smooth, fold in ricotta.  Fold in the rest of the ingredients.

And, I found the pastry is too sticky to be moved like how I used to!  So instead of the traditional method of cutting into 1cm rings and push out the middle, I roll it out and wrapped the filling like hmm... riviolis.

But they are still quite nice and well accepted by the Italians at hubby's work....