Jello Recipes
The Best Fourth of July Jello Recipes
If you are looking for fourth of July jello recipes, this blue, white and red striped jello dessert recipe is very good. A lot of jello recipes make use of different colored layers like this one does. You can either make this jello in a glass container with high sides or in a jello mold to tip out.
If you are using a jello mold, you need to make the blue layer first and the red layer last, rather than the other way around, because it will be upside down. This is a very tasty jello dessert with a fruity top and bottom layer and a creamy middle layer.
If you are going to a fourth of July party and you have been asked to bring something with you, this one is really good. A layered jello dessert always goes down well at parties and making a patriotic jello dessert is a clever idea. You will need a jello mold to make this striped jello dessert. If you do not have one, you can use highball glasses and make separate stripy desserts, but if you are doing that you will need to make the red layer first, because you will not be unmolding the jello and inverting it.
Trio Striped Jello Dessert for the Fourth of July
Ingredients -
3 oz package raspberry jello
1 envelope unflavored gelatin
1 cup half and half
1 cup sugar
8 oz softened cream cheese
2 ¼ cups boiling water
16 oz can blueberries, not drained
3 oz package blueberry jello
½ cup cold water
Preparation:
Dissolve the blueberry jello in a cup of boiling water, add the undrained blueberries and mix till well blended then pour this into a medium jello mold.
Chill until firm.
Soften the unflavored gelatin in the cold water. Heat the sugar with the half and half cream until hot but not boiling. Add the softened gelatin and the cream cheese. Blend in a blender until smooth, allow to cool to room temperature then pour it over the blueberry layer.
Chill until firm.
Dissolve the raspberry jello in 1 ¼ cups of boiling water completely allow to cool to room temperature and pour the mixture over the cheese layer.
Chill until set and serve by itself or with some whipped cream on the side.
Garnish with a sprig of fresh mint.
(Serves 8)
Photo Description:
With the flavors of raspberries and blueberries, this is a fruity jello dessert as well as a patriotic one. Jello molds come in all different shapes and sizes and you might like to use quite a plain-shaped jello mold, like a dome, for this one, because the important thing about this striped jello dessert for the fourth of July is the patriotic colors. You can see from this photo how a simple concept, like a triple striped jello dessert, looks really impressive. As long as you wait for each layer to set before adding the next, there is nothing difficult about making layered jello recipes.
The Old Fashioned Way of Making Jello
Making gelatin recipes and jello used to be a long, laborious process, but these days you simply combine jello powder with hot water and use the mixture to make a jello recipe. Modern jello recipes include fourth of July jello recipes amongst others. Imagine what your great grandparents and great great grandparents had to go through though. They had to make the gelatin themselves, rather than just tearing open a pack of jello powder.
Gelatin in the Old Days
Gelatin used to be a functional food in the 1800s and before. Aspic and gelatin was used in ancient Greek times to glaze, preserve, and bind foods. Wine, vinegar, almond extract, and other ingredients were used to flavor aspic in the old days. Meats were coated in gelatin to preserve them, so sweet gelatin was not made as much as savory gelatin.
Renaissance era chefs would make elaborate jello mold recipes in the form of fortresses, castles, and huge buildings, complete with windows, turrets and doors! You can make similar molds these days by using a plastic castle-shaped jello mold and some jello but the process was much trickier before.
How Gelatin Was Obtained
The collagen for making gelatin had to be extracted by hand from meat bones. Deer antlers were used as a collagen source in the Middle Ages. Calves' knuckles and feet were also popular. In the 1800s, housewives would extract collagen from fish bladder membranes. They would scrape the hair from calves' feet and simmer the boiling broth with egg whites to clarify it. Filtering bags were used to filter it. It took all day to make gelatin and the end result was dried in rounds, leaves, or sheets. In 1890, Charles B Knox decided when watching his wife make jelly from calves' feet that an easy to use gelatin mix would be a simpler idea... and the rest is history! These days there are thousands of easy jello recipes and if you want to make a striped jello dessert or a jello cheesecake, it is a lot simpler.
