Lightened-Up Cannoli Cups Recipe — 70 Calories a Piece

By Jamie Hollis • 8 October, 2014

A box of mini phyllo shells from the freezer aisle solves the part of cannoli that usually keeps people from making it at home: frying the shells.

These pre-baked cups go straight from the freezer to a hot oven for eight minutes, and once they’ve cooled, all that’s left is a bowl of sweetened ricotta and a few minutes of filling. Twenty-four cups come out of one batch, which is enough for a dessert table without turning into a project.

The filling leans on part-skim ricotta instead of the whole-milk version most cannoli recipes call for, with honey standing in for the powdered sugar that usually sweetens the mix. Mini dark chocolate chips get folded through at the end rather than left as a garnish on top, so every bite has a few.

Each finished cup comes in around 70 calories, with 3 grams of protein and 3 grams of sugar, close enough to a bite of the real thing to satisfy the craving without the fried-shell calories that usually come with it.

Because the shells are baked separately from the filling, there’s no oven timing to juggle against a stovetop step. The shells can be made a day or two ahead and left at room temperature in an airtight container; the filling comes together cold, in a bowl, whenever it’s time to serve.

That split also makes this an easy recipe to scale up for a party. Doubling the filling takes a few extra minutes with a whisk, while doubling the shells is just a second package from the freezer.

The size of the cups matters more than it might seem. A full-size cannoli shell holds several times the filling of one of these mini cups, which is most of why a whole cannoli can run 300 calories or more while one of these lands closer to a piece of hard candy.

Serving them in a mini format isn’t a diet trick so much as portion math: the ratio of filling to shell stays roughly the same, there’s just less of both.

Ingredients You’ll Need

Mini phyllo shells, sold frozen in packs of fifteen, are the base for this. Two packages get close to two dozen cups, with a few extra shells left over depending on the brand.

They bake directly from frozen, so there’s no need to thaw them first; a few minutes in a hot oven crisps them back up after the freezer softened them slightly in transit.

Part-skim ricotta is the filling’s backbone, and it’s worth draining before mixing. Ricotta straight from the tub carries more whey than it looks like, and that extra liquid can turn a thick filling into something closer to soup once it sits in a warm shell.

Honey sweetens the mix without the grainy texture powdered sugar can leave behind, and a splash of vanilla extract rounds out the ricotta’s slightly tangy edge. Mini chocolate chips melt less readily than standard-size ones when they hit the ricotta, which keeps the filling from streaking brown before it’s served.

A light dusting of powdered sugar substitute finishes the top, more for the look of a bakery case than for sweetness.

Why Part-Skim Ricotta Works Here

Whole-milk ricotta is what most cannoli filling starts with, and it’s richer for a reason: more fat means a smoother, more spreadable texture straight out of the container.

Part-skim loses some of that richness, but ricotta’s texture comes as much from its curd structure as from fat content, so the swap doesn’t leave the filling grainy or thin the way it might in a custard or a cream sauce.

Draining it through a fine sieve for ten or fifteen minutes tightens the texture back up, which matters more for the final result than the fat percentage does.

Honey replaces the powdered sugar that traditional cannoli filling relies on, and it changes the filling’s behavior slightly. Honey holds moisture, so a filling made with it stays a touch softer at room temperature than one made with powdered sugar, which sets up firmer as it chills.

That softness is part of why filling the shells just before serving matters more here than it might with a stiffer filling. The two swaps together are most of the difference between a filling that runs 70 calories a cup and one that runs closer to double that.

Assembling and Serving

The shells and the filling are best kept apart until close to serving time. Phyllo is dry and brittle by design, and ricotta filling is wet enough to soften that structure within an hour or so of contact. A cup filled the night before a party will have gone chewy by the time guests arrive.

The shells hold up fine on their own for a day or two in a sealed container at room temperature, and the filling keeps for a few days covered in the fridge, so both halves can be made well ahead of when they need to come together.

A piping bag makes filling twenty-four small shells faster than a spoon, but a spoon and a butter knife get the job done without any special equipment.

Filling just before people start eating, not necessarily the exact minute of serving but within an hour or so, keeps the shells crisp enough that they still have some crunch left when someone bites in.

The powdered sugar substitute goes on last, dusted over the top with a small sieve, since it tends to dissolve into the filling if it sits too long before serving.

For a dessert table where cups might sit out for a couple of hours, keeping the shells and filling in separate containers nearby and filling in small batches works better than filling all twenty-four at once.

It also gives some flexibility on quantity — a batch of filling stretches to cover whatever shells are left if a few crack in the package, and any extra filling keeps in the fridge for a few days on its own, good for spreading on toast or spooning over fruit even without a shell involved.

Leftover shells, if there are any, hold their crunch best stacked loosely rather than pressed flat in a container — phyllo cracks under weight more easily than it goes stale from air. A half-empty tray of these tends not to survive long enough for that to matter.