24 Feb Real Fruit Jelly Sweets

It may surprise you just how easy it is to make your own Real Fruit Jelly Sweets. Just pick your favourite juice, add gelatine and a little honey and lemon juice, and you are A for away. As an added bonus, you can control the sweetness – the amount of honey/sugar you add depends on how sweet you like it and also how sweet the juice is. You may even choose to leave it out altogether. Don’t skip the lemon juice though – the gelatine tends to dull the fruity flavour a little and the lemon juice gives it the boost it needs.

The recipe is easy enough that you can get your kids involved – just be warned that the mixture is rather sticky! Its really worth buying a few fun silicone moulds (which you can find at a baking store) but if you don’t have any and want to make these right now just use an ice tray. Or pour the mixture into a baking dish, and once set you can cut it into cubes or triangles.

As far as flavours go, I tried just about every fruit juice I could find. The best in my opinion are tropical, granadilla, cranberry, blackcurrant and pineapple. My husband loved the grapefruit too. The colour of the juice may fade a little after heating, so I added a drop of food colouring to some of the flavours. If you’d rather keep it natural, that’s fine too!

Ingredients:

250ml fruit juice
45ml powdered gelatine
5-10ml lemon juice
5-15ml honey or sugar
A few drops of food colouring (optional)

Method:

• Pour the fruit juice into a small saucepan and sprinkle the gelatine evenly over the juice.
• Leave the mixture ‘bloom’ for 5 minutes. It will look thick and spongy now.
• Heat the mixture gently over medium heat until all the gelatine has dissolved, stirring frequently.
• Remove from heat and stir in honey/sugar and lemon juice to taste.
• Add food colouring if desired.
• Fill your moulds with the mixture and refrigerate for 1 hour until set.
• Carefully remove the sweets from the moulds.
• The sweets will keep for a few weeks in the fridge.