Jelly Candies

I am throwing a baby shower on Friday. Naturally, I wanted to throw my friend the cutest mustache party of all time, but because the theme is a little over done, we decided to go with a rubber duckies.

I love it.
I have never had so much fun trying to find rubber duckies, which concidering it is spring and easter and everything, you would think it would be easy. Not so much! Luckliy I stumbled on a rubber ducky candy mold. Which means only one thing, an excuse to make candy!

Originally I thought I would start out easy, by making rubber ducky chocolates, when I stumbled on an easy recipe for Jelly Candies.

1 pkg of flavored Jello
3 pkg of Gelatin (they usually come 4 to a box)
1/3-1/2 cups COLD water



And so it begins:

Start out by adding the jello and gelatin SLOWLY into the water as you mix. Use a pyrex mixing cup, or another heat resistant bowl. Mix slowly and methodically to avoid trapping air bubbles in your candy. This will make your candies more transparent! To be honest with you, I didn't have patience for this, and ended up dumping the packets right in, and mixing the dickens out of it. I discovered later, that the time-consuming mix may not have been totally necessary!


Slowly mix geltin, jello, and water. Or if you are like me, just mix it fast.

With a small pan, boil water and put the bowl of candy mixture IN the water until the mixture melts!  Scooop the foam off the top, and pour into your mold.




Place the bowl and mixture in boiling water, allow the mixture to melt.




Scoop the foam off the top

Pour mixture into your mold

Here's the trick. If you want transparent candies, leave the mixture in the hot water for about 10-15 mins. It won't solidify and the bubbles will slowly rise out of the solution until you will be able to make pretty clear gems, or hearts, or Christmas tress, or whatever your mold is.

Freeze the mold for about 10 mins, peel the candies out, and wala! 

The Chemistry!

SO.... how does it work? I am sure you have all heard the rumors about Jello coming from cow hooves right? You are not totally wrong. The most common gelatin's such as Jello, are made from cow and pig bones by collecting a protein call collagen. Collagen is an little bit like DNA in that it is made up of long protein strands called amino acids that twist around each other, however collagen has three strands instead of two. Collagen is found in your bones and skin too.

As a powder, these long proteins are relatively "short." By boiling the gelatin, we break down the proteins even smaller, then as the mixture cools the proteins re-form into longer chains than before. They trap any water, flavoring, and food coloring in the gaps of the collagen.

Jello is so jiggly because there is a large amount of water trapped in the collagen, our jelly candies are more solid because we have a higher ratio of collagen to water.

Theoretically, we could increase the amount of gelatin in the recipe to "toughen" it up. The way the recipe is, the jellies have the consistency of gummy worms. If we added more gelatin we could achieve a gummy bear consistency.

These candies taste a lot like... well... Jello. Which isn't surprising, because it is the only flavoring we added. When I make these again I want to try it with real fruit juices and plain gelatin to see if I get better results!

Until next time!