Eat The Evidence

During my gummy classes and demos, I’ve been telling people that any jello recipe should work as gummy with extra gelatin added, including those based on milk ingredients for white, opaque jello. This week, in advance of my demo at the Houston Cake Club’s Cake Decorating ExPO (I really am scheduled to demonstrate even though I’m not listed on the page), I figured I’d give opaque jello a shot myself.

Previously, I’ve added White White food colouring to regular gummy mixes and it does make it opaque. You can even swirl it just a little bit to make a marbled effect:

Amoebas. No, wait, not amoebas; these are test of mixing White White into otherwise standard green gummy. The one on the left is swirled a little, the right is mixed fairly thoroughly. I added a drop of the original transparent gummy on each for contrast.

But in order to test making gummy from scratch recipe for white jello, I had to start with an actual recipe, since I’d never made that before. So I used the oft-cited Food Librarian recipe, but tweaked it to suit gummy. Here’s what I did: I mixed 4 envelopes of Knox gelatin with 1/2 cup of water in my small nonstick pot I always use for gummy. I let it bloom thoroughly. Then I added a small squirt of hot water from the baster (see my basic gummy tutorial for more on using basters) and warmed the whole thing over low heat until it was melted. I added the can of sweetened condensed milk and mixed thoroughly over low heat until it was warm and completely blended. I didn’t add any extra water beyond that.

The result was gummy that did eventually set up, especially in the fridge, but much, much more slowly than regular gummy. It also felt a bit floppy compared to the usual gummy, so I think a fifth envelope might be in order. Taste-wise it was actually quite pleasant, a mildly sweet, soft candy. I thought it’d be horribly over-sweetened but it wasn’t.

Unfortunately, the sweetened condensed milk had a significant yellow tinge, so the gummy isn’t really white. It’s more like ivory. So while this worked well enough, especially with other colour added, I’m going to have to do more research to get an actually white gummy.

Here are photos of my research, which happened to coincide with me wanting to play with my new Star Wars molds that I had on preorder since last spring and only arrived a couple of weeks ago. The R2s are the gummy as described above, the Han Solos are the same stuff with some Americolor Super Black added.

I'd make some lewd comments about black rubber Han Solos if this wasn't a family-friendly blog. Hey kids, look, R2D2! *innocent*

He totally shot first. Just sayin'.

So that was okay, but really, Carbonite needs to look metallic. BRING OUT THE EDIBLE PEARL SPRAY!

Awww yeah, that's what I'm talking about! Also, who knew that Carbonite smells like vanilla?

Now the gummy looks like a little chunk of metal, except that you can make him touch his toes:

"Calisthentics. Why did it have to be calisthentics?" Whoops, I'm crossing the streams again.

Here’s a side-by-side with an unsprayed one so you can see how dark the black gummy comes out:

Either way, he's chewie.

Then I hit an R2 unit with the pearl spray too, just for kicks. Note how it definitely makes the lines easier to see:

Shiny happy droids laughing...gold and silver (and pearl spray) shiii-ii-iine.

"Bleep."

Then I did some quick dabbing on another R2 unit with some edible-ink markers and that turned out okay too (albeit sloppy because I wasn’t going for precision):

"Now you can see the resemblance to my cousin Hal."

So the overall result is that this recipe works, but if you want it less floppy, add more gelatin. I still have some leftover stuff to play with tomorrow, which looks eerily like a lump of flesh in the pot. Hrm, maybe I should add a little bit of a pinkish hue and see what terrifying monstrosities I can create while still keeping a PG rating on this blog…

PS Maybe I need to find a way to get them to the Firefly people so they can hide gummies all over their sets.