In the meantime, here's the second recipe from the book, Pastel Dessert. It is a very simple dessert wherein you mix a package of flavored gelatin, a package of vanilla pudding mix, and whipped cream. A fun variation attached is to spread the resulting mixture into a baked pie shell, which is exactly what I did. For all of the recipes in these books that have optional variations, I'm going to make the version that seems most appealing and call it a day--otherwise I'd need to make the same recipe various times, and that's just not going to happen. But I enjoyed the idea of a creamy pink pie, so I grabbed an envelope of cherry Jell-O and a frozen par-baked pie crust and dove right in.
As the recipe would suggest, this is an easy dessert to make, which is something I like about gelatin: you can make tasty, light, and often impressive dishes with relatively little time or effort. In the early twentieth century, Jell-O branded itself as the perfect food for newlywed women to cook, with the assumption that said women probably were not yet cooking experts but still had a husband to feed. Even today I think it makes a lot of sense as something for newlyweds, kids, or anyone who's short on time or cash to make.
Anyway, this recipe comes together exactly as the recipe states. The only thing that worried me during the process was when I was mixing the whipped cream and the gelatin mixture, I didn't think they were going to blend entirely. For a while they just sort of marbled, which honestly would make for an attractive dessert as well, but eventually I got a completely uniform...Pepto-Bismol pink.
Now, I knew the pie would be pink--in fact, that's why I chose the cherry flavor, but the red food coloring is potent enough to do this even when diluted with a whole quart's worth of whipped cream. And let me tell you, the flavoring is just as strong. This pie is very sweet and very fake fruity. My tolerance for that sort of thing is high, but the whole time I wished I had made a double batch of filling, using one packet of Jell-O and one packet of unflavored gelatin. However, that would have been enough to feed a platoon, because not only did one batch fill a nine-inch pie shell, but also all these baking cups (plus one that I had already eaten by the time I took this photo)!
After a couple of servings, I got used to the strong flavor and finished off the pie and cups no problem. I guess it didn't hurt that I had some extra whipped cream to pile on top to further dilute the flavor. However, in the future, I would use fresh fruit juice in place of some of the water and one envelope of Knox in place of the Jell-O flavoring (this texture would be especially nice with fresh-squeezed orange juice), though using the boxed pudding mix is a lot faster and cheaper than making homemade vanilla pudding, so for an easy dessert I would probably leave that part as written. Another quick note: if you choose to put some of this filling into a pie crust, the crust will stay crisp for only a day or so after the gelatin sets, so if you don't like mushy pie crust and don't have a crowd to feed right after making this, I recommend setting the gelatin in individual-sized serving dishes and foregoing the crust altogether.
All in all, this recipe is a good idea that would be a fun little dessert with better flavoring. I can particularly imagine a few people coming together and making several batches of this with different juices to make different pastel colors (lime, lemon, blueberry, any red fruit juice, grape) for an Easter celebration at church. If you increased the amount of gelatin you could probably even use a deviled egg platter or plastic Easter eggs to make egg-shaped molds. So I officially declare the Pastel Dessert redeemable.
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