The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #187: Tinted Coconut (Easter Special Part I)

Howdy, Jigglers! For Easter, being unable to participate in most of the normal Easter festivities due to the current lockdown, I decided to go all out in the one way I could: with Jell-O. So here is the first part of a double header of Eastery Jell-O madness, which is Tinted Coconut. This recipe is a general garnish that can be used on all sorts of desserts like cakes, cookies, donuts--the sky's the limit with coconut, of course.

At the suggestion of the recipe book in another recipe (stay tuned), I wanted to make this to accompany some Jell-O Easter Eggs as a green coconut nest, so I knew I was going to go with the lime flavor. But I also knew that I was not going to actually eat plain flavored coconut by itself, so I decided to make some sort of festive dessert on which to use the coconut. Since my favorite genre of dessert is cookies, I couldn't not make a big batch of cookies for this.

Back to the actual recipe, though. This is easily the simplest, quickest gelatin recipe I have ever even seen. You measure out some Jell-O, you measure out some coconut, then you shake them together in a container. Done.

Though I usually try to make Jell-O recipes as natural and healthy as possible, I couldn't really find any way to do that in this case. How do you add powdered lime flavor or make this recipe work at all without some amount of sugar? Furthermore, how do you add powdered food coloring? For this reason, I just went with normal Jell-O powder, and it was very simple and effective.

Really, there just is not much to say about this recipe. It works. It's versatile. It's easy. So let's talk more about my application of the tinted coconut.

For the cookies, I used the Easy Sugar Cookies recipe on Allrecipes, except I substituted in whole rye flour for about a quarter of the flour because I ran out of the normal flour that I had and knew that non-bulk packages of flour are very scarce around here at the moment. Plus, I always enjoy having a little wholesomeness in what I make, even if the final product is not the most healthy option out there.

The icing recipe I used was the Sugar Cookie Icing recipe at Veggie Balance, which I primarily used because it didn't call for many ingredients. A quick word to the wise about this recipe, though: if you use artifical vanilla, it will probably turn the icing a light brown color, similar to maple icing. For me that worked out fine, but in case that's not what you're after, just be aware.

All of this yielded a whole mess of cookies, and even more icing. I used the rest of the icing on some cinnamon graham crackers, which was delicious. However, I didn't feel that lime-flavored coconut would go well with cinnamon, so I ended up with some leftover coconut for which I have still not found a use.

These cookies turned out very tasty and pretty with just a hint of lime flavor from the coconut and a bit of nuttiness from the rye flour, which suited me just fine together.

Kudos once again to General Foods for coming up with such a simple way to incorporate Jell-O into a fairly fancy-looking dessert garnish. I think the coconut would work great in a number of different applications, but particularly set into frosting as a cake topping. This would be especially well suited, in my estimation, to a pink lemonade cake with raspberry-flavored coconut on the outside.

That about wraps it up for Tinted Coconut, but it will make a reprisal in Part II of the Easter Special!