The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #37: Cherry Charlotte Russe

Howdy, Jigglers! After making the Tuna Salad, I was ready for a dessert gelatin recipe again, and in particular one featuring ladyfingers, since I had a package of ladyfingers lying around and ladyfingers + Jell-O is always a wonderful combination. It's like a cheater's sponge cake. In the end I chose Cherry Charlotte Russe, a creamy, fruity dish studded with nuts and served in individual serving dishes.

The ingredients for this dish were fairly easy to replicate in a healthier fashion. I left the ladyfingers, whipped cream, and pecans exactly as they were, but instead of cherry Jell-O, I used unflavored gelatin in pureed cherries and two tablespoons of sugar. For the cherries I bought a bag of frozen cherries, thawed them, and then blended them up in a blender, which worked well and produced enough liquid to make the appropriate amount of gelatin. However, if you use a different type of cherry, your sugar requirements may change--maraschino cherries, for instance, would need no additional sugar, while tart cherries would need much more than a couple of tablespoons.

The method for making this recipe is standard and simple; I bloomed the gelatin in the cherry puree, added sugar, heated it up until very warm to dissolve the gelatin and sugar, refrigerated it in a bowl until slightly thick, whipped the cream in the meantime, folded  the cream and nuts into the gelatin, placed some ladyfingers into my serving dishes, scooped the gelatin mixture into said dishes, then refrigerated it all again.

The only tricky part of making this recipe, and most Jell-O recipes in general, is catching the gelatin at the correct intermediate point of setting. If you want the gelatin to only reach the slightly thickened, very thick, or set but not firm stages, you really have to keep an eye on it, as the time required for it to reach those stages varies depending upon the type of container it's in, its position in your fridge, how concentrated the actual gelatin is, and its temperature at the start of the setting process. But it always seems to me that the more frequently I check on a batch of setting gelatin, the slower it sets, but if I know it's going to take a while and I wait a long while to check it, it winds up too hardened by the time I check. Gelatin that sets too much can always be heated slightly to resoften it, but getting it right can be a little frustrating.

In this case, my gelatin may have been just slightly too soft when I mixed in the cream and pecans because it didn't marble all that attractively, but it still set up fine in the end. 

You can see, roughly, the size of serving dishes I used for all of this creamy goodness, but keep in mind that this recipe makes eleven servings of that size.

The good news is that the Cherry Charlotte Russe is so tasty that you won't have to worry about it going to waste! The cream lightens up the gelatin quite a bit while still being satisfying, and the ladyfingers really make it a special treat with their sweetness.

This dessert would be more than suitable for a spring picnic or family gathering. It feels indulgent, but, at least the way I made it, it's fairly low sugar for a dessert, and it has some real fruit and dairy in it, so it's fairly low guilt, too.

So, once again, thanks to General Foods for coming up with this winner of a recipe.

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #167: Tuna Salad

Howdy, Jigglers! Today I bring you one of the JOJ recipes I was looking forward to the least--a category which is almost entirely populated by s e a f o o d. My husband and I had just gotten back from the grocery store one day last week, and I was unpacking a couple of cans of tuna when I unthinkingly asked my husband to pick out the next Jell-O recipe for me to make. He immediately pointed at the tiny can in my hand and said, "I know there are tuna Jell-O recipes. You've got it, so you have to make it happen."

For some reason my camera was not cooperating with me on photographing both the recipe and the actual salad--please bear with my cell phone photos.

We then flipped through JOJ and found Tuna Salad, which conveniently also required several other ingredients I had on hand, like olives, celery, mayonnaise, and onion. I just had to grab a cucumber and I was ready to go. At this juncture my husband also challenged me to eat the entirety of the tuna salad since there have been a few of these recipes (mostly involving tomatoes) that I have been unable to finish due to gagging too much.

I secretly was okay with the idea of the tuna salad because I recently got a fish-shaped mold for a song and was itching to try it out. There was a bit of an obstacle to overcome, though, which was how to replicate the flavor of Celery Flavor Jell-O, which hasn't been manufactured for half a century. After debating pureeing some celery to make celery juice (too much work!), I decided to replace the salt in the recipe with celery salt and call it a day, which worked out fine. Other than using the celery salt and unflavored gelatin in place of Jell-O (a word to the wise: you can find boxes of the salad Jell-O flavors on eBay, but I would certainly recommend against consuming their contents), I followed the recipe exactly, except I accidentally got a lime instead of a lemon.

The recipe was very simple to make. The only problem was that I was worried about the onion. This is the first Jell-O recipe I have made including onion, and I thought if anything was going to make the salad completely inedible, it would be raw onion bits. So I took it really easy when I was adding the onion to avoid overpowering the other flavors.

 I was pleased with how well the chunky salad molded, though it certainly looked less than appetizing on the whole. Regardless, much to my surprise (and perhaps slightly to my husband's chagrin), this salad is simply delicious! It is refreshing, rather light, and not too fishy. Plus, the gelatin works much better than your typical tuna salad at keeping the vegetables crispy, which it did all week long. The hint of lime even shone through on the palate, while the onion did not. Over all, though, I was flabbergasted by how good the olive slices were in completing the dish. I heartily advise against omitting them, as their brininess contrasts beautifully with the creamy gelatin and the other, milder vegetables.

Clearly I had no trouble finishing off the tuna salad after all! This recipe was shockingly good for what it is, and I don't even care for regular tuna salad. I also believe the De Luxe version of the salad sounds good, though I don't know how well gelatin would keep diced apple fresh. This cookbook sure does love tuna with apples, though.

In short, General Foods actually made a competent seafood Jell-O recipe. I don't know if it was brutal amounts of talent or brutal amounts of luck that did it, but I do know that I would make this again someday in a heartbeat, which is the exact opposite of what I was anticipating with Tuna Salad.

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #89: Frosty Melon

Howdy, Jigglers! Of all of the recipes in JOJ with accompanying photos, Frosty Melon was probably the one I have been looking forward to the most. It looks like an abstract sculpture, and it's made up of only melon, gelatin with fruit, and cream cheese. What could go wrong?

I also love that this recipe is in the "Two-Way Salads" chapter of the book. All of these recipes basically make me think the same thing, which is that they are for people who want to think of their fruity desserts as healthy side dishes. This is a delusion with which I sympathize completely, as I also will use any excuse to play down my sweets addiction.

In any case, to make this fruity treat, I started out with a honeydew melon, a cup of mango nectar and unflavored gelatin as the filling, a can of fruit cocktail with its syrup, and of course some cream cheese. As a side note, for the longest time I had only eaten honeydew in fruit mixes and never enjoyed it, but if you get a whole melon and eat it that way, it tastes ten times more sweet and juicy than its pre-cut version, so if you haven't tried it that way, I wholly recommend it.

Making this recipe is remarkably simple, though it leaves you with a lot of leftover gelatin mix. I had enough to fill five individual serving dishes. If you wanted to avoid this, you could scoop out some of the melon flesh before filling the melon, though that would leave you with extra melon to deal with. 

 I was heartily pleased with how the final product turned out aesthetically. When I first got it assembled, it just looked like a volleyball, like so:

But once you cut into it, the concentric rings of fruit and cheese are quite nice. It does look like something one would eat in the very distant future, but who doesn't want a circular treat sometimes?

The Frosty Melon delivers in terms of taste as well. The unsweetened cream cheese accentuates the sweetness of the melon, fruit, and gelatin, and the textures mesh together surprisingly well. The cheese also helps this otherwise light dessert salad become a little more filling.

Another thought that occurred to me is that this dish would be a tasty way to model the earth or another planet for kids. You would just fill the center of a cantaloupe with red gelatin and color the cream cheese to look like the planet's surface. I love it when science and the culinary arts combine!

Whether it's for a geology lesson, a volleyball party, or just for a sweet mod picnic, the Frosty Melon is a superb "salad." Kudos to the General Foods team, and until next time, stay frosty.