Endangered Dessert: Chocolate Ravioli

When I was a little kid, Christmas meant two things: cannoli and chocolate ravioli.   Everyone knows what cannolis are thanks to a bunch of pop culture references to them.  Of course, the TV-and-movie versions of cannoli are the (inauthentic) Sicilian cannoli, with their sugarry ricotta filling with chocolate chips, and greyish, bubbly shell.  (Authentic Sicilian cannoli have candied fruit in the filling rather than chocolate chips.  But people hate candied fruit, so over the past 30 or so years all North American Sicilian cannoli have become candied-fruit-free.)

Anyways.  

My family makes cannoli, but not Sicilian cannoli because we aren't Sicilian.  I know:  shocker!  How dare there be variations in Italian food!  It needs to be homogeneously monolithic just like Indian and Chinese foods! (Yes, I am being sarcastic.) Our cannoli are made with a light, crisp shell and stuffed with chocolate custard on one side and vanilla-lemon custard on the other.   Does that sound good?  Are you wondering why you can't find these in pastry shops?  Yeah, me too.

Unlike the cannoli, I'm pretty sure no one outside of my mother's town has ever heard of chocolate ravioli.  There may have been some chef on Top Chef or Iron Chef who made a chocolate ravioli.  Of course, no chocolate ravioli made on a Foody Show would ever resemble what my family makes.  In fact, my family's chocolate raviolis would probably make you lose Top/Iron Chef.  The filling is cocoa, ricotta and sugar in a lumpy, inhomogeneous, somewhat revolting mass.  The filling is stuffed into a light sweet dough and deep fried. 

The result is...fantastic!  But very unsophisticated.  You would have thought that some enterprising pastry shop would have tried to make a nice, tasty chocolate ravioli, but no.  Instead they just keep making what white folks expect.

The only people making these desserts are old Italian ladies from my mom's town.  And people like me don't even know what the recipe is for the sweet dough.  And so, the chocolate ravioli is an endangered dessert.