Chocolate Fritters

1 cup all-purpose flour
Pinch salt
2 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1 lemon, zested
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus 2 cups extra-virgin olive oil, for frying (my cookbook says 4 cups)
2 tablespoons sweet white wine (my cookbook says dry white wine)
1/2 cup bittersweet chocolate, chopped medium fine
1/3 cup hazelnuts, toasted and coarsely chopped
1/4 cup apricot jam (cookbook says 1/2 cup)
1 egg, lightly beaten
Honey, for brushing the fritters

Place the flour on a clean work surface and add the salt, sugar, lemon zest, oil, and enough wine to make a firm but tender dough. Knead for 5 minutes, then wrap the dough in plastic and let it rest 30 minutes.
In the meantime, make the filling by combining the chocolate, nuts, and jam and mix with a spoon. Set aside, covered.
(Cookbook says to flour the work surface) Roll the dough out to 1/4-inch thickness and, using a 3-inch cookie cutter, cut out as many circles as possible. Place a dab of filling on each circle of dough, moisten the edges with a bit of beaten egg, and fold each round in half, pressing them shut with finger pressure or a fork.
In a tall-sided pot, heat the oil to 350 degrees F and fry the until they are deep golden brown. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. Brush each fritter with honey and serve hot or cold.

RESULTS: Suz has never seen An Affair to Remember, so I made her come over last night to watch it, and we thought we'd try a recipe that we saw in Mario's cookbook that caught both our eyes. The picture looks gorgeous, almost like perfectly brown hushpuppies with chocolate inside them. Long story short, it was disastrous, and I'm not sure why. The dough was very damp, and I don't know if that'd because of the extreme humidity we've been having or what, but it was damp and greasy. When we put the filling in, the dough teared, and all the chocolate came out when we fried them. They didn't taste moist and gooey like the picture looks like they'd taste, they were oily and crumbly and awful. The filling was extremely tasty, though. Suz thought that maybe it was just a bad recipe, because we followed it really closely. I don't have a lot of frying, much less deep frying, experience, so I wanted to do it by the book, but it was just terrible. At first we thought we didn't have enough flour in it (because of the humidly), but we added some and the dough got really tough really quickly. Also, in the book he says it'll make 18 fritters, and we were rolling the dough as thin as we could without tearing it, much thinner actually than 1/4 inch, and we got 11. We tried making some with thicker dough, and it didn't tear so much, but we couldn't have gotten 18 out of it, and besides it still didn't fry up right. Maybe my oil was too hot? But it was on 350 on the nose.... I don't know...

Anyway, I did a search for the recipe online and I found this, which is exactly the same except for the parts that I noted. Nothing, I think, that would justify the extremely different results than what we got (I do think the filling had a little too much apricot in it, but it was still nice). Anyone have any ideas? I'm stumped. More so because a lady on Amazon says she makes them for her husband all the time, and the online recipe got 5 stars from another lady. I just don't get it!