Gelatin Recipes

Someone asked for a how-to on the homemade jello knock offs. Here are the recipes I made today. You can make jello out of pretty much any juice, add any fruit except raw pineapple and kiwi and something else- mango? You can use booze for a grown-up party- champagne with strawberries, layered Irish coffee, a tequila sunrise (with homemade grenadine) in a little individual mold. There are loads of options and unflavored gelatin is easy to work with. If you want more sweetener in yours just add a little more gelatin to balance out the firmness. This really does not take any longer than making Jello from a box. Enjoy!

Berry Gelatin Cups

2 cups water, hot
1/3 to 1/2 cup succanat or honey
a good handful of mixed frozen berries
2 Tbs unflavored gelatin + 1/4 cup hot water

Combine water and succanat and bring to a rolling boil to fully dissolve all the sugar. If using honey you just need the honey to dissolve totally in hot water. Add the berries and cook for a few minutes (3? 5 tops).

Whisk the gelatin into the hot berry mix. Ladle the berry gelatin quickly into silicone or foil muffin liners in a regular sized muffin tin. This should make about 8 of them. I then place the whole tray in the freezer. Once they are frozen you can transfer them into a ziploc or some sort of lidded container and leave them frozen. If you pack them frozen they will be thawed enough to eat by noon and keep other things cold.

To make twice as many with a creamy layer- add another 3 T of gelatin to the hot berry mix. Stir in 2 cups of yogurt (sweetened or not, depending on how much sugar your kids require) or sour cream or a mix of yogurt and cream cheese or sour cream and cream cheese or yogurt and sour cream into the berry mix. It will look sort of grainy and weird. Stir in the gelatin and make sure its all very well dissolved and incorporated. Ladle into cups or pour into a mold and chill or freeze. As the mixture cools and sets it will separate into layers, creamy on top and clear on the bottom.


Orange Creamsicle Gelatin Cups

2 cups orange juice
1/3 cup honey or succanat
1 cup heavy cream
3 T unflavored gelatin

Heat the orange juice and sweetener together until the sugar is fully dissolved . Sprinkle the gelatin on the hot juice mixture and stir to dissolve it then whisk the cream into the orange juice. It will not look real pretty! Very grainy and sort of a blah peachy color but the creamy layer will separate out for a layered effect. I got lumps and had to strain mine into a 4 cup measuring cup and then poured it into my little silicone molds. This mix did not do so well in the fish and crab molds (the little fussy parts broke off) but the flower molded ones turned out very well and the taste was declared good when the defective ones were 'liquidated'.




Update: this last batch I used fresh berries (strawberries, cherries, and a few blueberries) and cut the sugar to 1/3 cup. The color was sort of brown, the flavor was not so 'berry' and it set up too hard. Kids were much less excited than usual. I usually use the frozen berry mix from Costco of blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries but, shockingly, the bag was empty and a little trail of blueberry stains marks the floor of my garage. Lesson: don't just eyeball the gelatin if you're skimping on sweetener!

I'm linking this to Just Another Meatless Monday at "Hey What's For Dinner Mom"