Annette Joseph: Hi! I am Annette Joseph and I am a food and prop stylist. I am going to show you how to plan a holiday party on a budget and we are going to start off with a deconstructed cannoli, one of my favorite things. The ingredients that we'll be using today are a 15-ounce container of ricotta cheese, a 4.

5-ounce container of goat cheese, a cup of chocolate chips, preferably baby chocolate chips, and a half-a-cup of powdered sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon. For the raspberry sauce, we'll use three pints of raspberries and a cup of sugar and for the garnish, we'll use a chocolate covered cookie. Previously, I cooked down the raspberries and the sugar together on the cup top in this saucepan, this is a heavy-duty saucepan, I always suggest that, and then mix thoroughly and then I let it cook down for about ten minutes, stirring it occasionally. Also, be very careful with hot sugar, even with raspberries in it. It will burn you. What we want to do is we want to take a bowl and we are going to put -- I call this a dump-and-whirl recipe which I love. We are going to take some ricotta cheese and we are making the filling basically for a cannoli. We are going to use some goat cheese, I love goat cheese because it has a little bit of a twist. It's kind of lumpy, so you have to really blend it well and then we are going to add some powdered sugar and that just really gives you a nice consistency rather than using a granulated sugar, I'd like to use powdered sugar, because it has a really good mouth-feel. And we use about a half-a-cup of that, I don't like it too, too terribly sweet, but I do like it sweet enough, so that it complements the raspberry sauce that we are going to make with it later. The raspberry sauce actually has a lot of sugar content, so it gives it that really good sweetness. So that's nice and blended. And then we are going to put in some chocolate chips. I don't use all the chocolate chips. It's about a cup of chocolate chips. I leave a few, because I'd like to garnish the top of our cannoli, because we are putting in the cute little rounded vessel, I call it a little baby fish bowl, we'll see that later. And we'll add a little bit of cinnamon for that nice cannoli flavor. You know when you bite into a cannoli, it has a little bit of a cinnamon flavor to it and that's what makes it a cannoli, I guess. So that is all blended together and ready to go into our vessel. So the next thing we are going to need to do to make our sauce is we are going to strain it with a strainer into a bowl. So we are just going to pour it directly into the strainer, be very, very careful because it does splatter, it is hot sugar. And then we are just going to sort of let it drip into the bowl and as it's dripping into the bowl, what I'd like to do is I like to stir it, because I am impatient and also what it does is, is it makes the seeds sort of rise to the top and what we are trying to do is we are trying to get remove all these seeds, so that we have a really nice, clear, pretty red sauce that we are going to add to our deconstructed cannoli. Okay, so I think we are good with our raspberry sauce. As you can see, this is sort of like a pulp. I mean you can take your time and really grind this down and get every little bit of goodness out of it, but this is a step that you don't want to have in your sauce, all the seedy, pulpy stuff. Now that we've completed all the steps, we are going to do my favorite part which is assembling our deconstructed cannoli. This is really cute. It's I call it a mini fish bowl. But as the stylist, we are always looking for fabulous vessels to put things in, because the more fabulous your vessel, the more fabulous your presentation, and the more you'll impress your friends. So this is all about impressing your friends, but on a budget. So a couple of little insider tips about being a food stylist is that it's all about how you look at it. Have you ever wonder like on the pages of a magazine, how these things look so gorgeous that when you make the recipes, they don't look like that? Well, I am going to teach you two little tricks for making this cannoli and it look just like it came out of a magazine and your friends are going to know it on. So the first that a photo stylist, food stylist, prop stylist uses is this prop. It's a cute little baby spoon, we use it for everything. So we are going to precede it to make our cannoli. With our teeny-tiny fabulous spoon, it's going to make your life a lot easier. I know it seems like it will take longer, but it won't. And we put a little bit of the cannoli filling in the bottom of our little fish bowl and then we take a little bit of the raspberry sauce and we drizzle it in there. See how cute that looks already. It's three layers of the cannoli filling that goes into this. And the last layer we really stack up. Okay! Ready for another stylist tip? This is a big one. You are never going to believe what we use, when we style, but we use something really cool, we use these tweezers. Yes, tweezers are my favorite tool. What we do, is we'll take these little chippy chunks and we'll actually put them in there to make it look really appetizing at a bowl and fantastical, and actually when you're done, you could take a picture of it. And it looks just like a dessert in a magazine, just really kind of cool. And then we finish it off with our little chocolate twirl and then we put it in this really cool storage box that you would store your ornaments in, and we've repurposed it as a tray. These look like cute little ornaments and I've actually put little ornaments in there and it's just a wonderful to repurpose something that you would just put in your closet and we are actually going to put this on the buffet table. So here is our finished product on our table, it looks gorgeous and you also know that you've repurposed something that would have been in your closet and look at how beautiful these cute little baby fish bowls look with the deconstructed cannoli in it and they not only look beautiful but they taste delicious.