My mom and I made this yesterday. I would like to say the date and colors were purposefully coordinated for making a patriotic dish for Memorial Day, and they easily could have been, but in fact it’s just an impressive coincidence. We picked Monday because it was the first day we’ve had an opportunity to do it, and red and blue were simply the two colors we happened to end up with enough of as we accumulated jello for this over the past few months.
It’s super easy to make, and it looks super cool. This can be a go-to for anyone that needs a simple but impressive item to bring to a potluck or something like that.
If you want to try it yourself there are lots of recipes you can find online. I’m sure they’re all pretty much the same, but we used this one if you want to follow one you know works.
Some hints, if you make it:
Pay attention to the kind of containers you put the colored jello in to solidify. Keep in mind that you will be cutting these up later to mix together. First off, it needs to be something flat, not a bowl. It also should be large enough to disperse the jello so the layer of liquid isn’t too high or the jello layer will end up pretty thick. You don’t want it too thick because you want to cut it into small cubes, not big blocks. We made ours a bit too big because we had selected our containers by seeing how the amount of water used in the jello looked in them, not accounting for when the jello mix was stirred in it about doubled the amount of liquid, so the layer was thicker than we had wanted, making our eventual cubes larger than ideal.
When making the gelatin, we had some confusion about whether pouch and envelope were the same thing. The recipe says to use two envelopes, but in the box the gelatin pouches come in twos connected together. So we didn’t know if each pouch was supposed to be an envelope, meaning use one unit, or if the unit was the envelope meaning two envelopes was four pouches. We ended up trying the latter, and it worked, so if you have the same situation you should use the contents of four of the pouches.
