Ribbon Jelly and Cream.
1 package Coxe’s gelatine, soaked in 2 cups of cold water.
2 cups white sugar.
1 pint boiling water.
Juice and half the grated rind of 1 lemon.
1 cup pale wine.
¼ teaspoonful cinnamon.
Enough prepared cochineal or bright cranberry, or other fruit syrup to color half the jelly.
1 pint rich sweet cream whipped stiff with two table-spoonfuls powdered sugar, and a little vanilla.
Soak the jelly four hours. Add to it the sugar and seasoning, including the lemon; pour in the boiling water, and stir until entirely dissolved. Strain through a flannel bag, after adding the wine. Do not touch it while it is dripping. Divide the jelly, and color half of it pink, as above directed. Wet a mould, with a cylinder through the centre, in cold water, and put in the jelly, yellow and pink, in alternate layers, letting each get pretty firm before putting in the next, until all is used up. When you are ready to use it, wrap a hot wet cloth about the mould for a moment, and invert upon a dish. Have the cream whipped before you do this, and fill the open place in the middle with it, heaping it up well.
You can vary the coloring by making white and yellow blanc-mange out of one-quarter of the gelatine after it is soaked. Instead of water, pour a large cup of boiling milk over this. When dissolved, sweeten and beat into half of it the yolk of an egg. Heat over the fire in a vessel of boiling water for five minutes to cook the egg, stirring all the time. A stripe of the white or yellow blanc-mange sets off the wider “ribbons” of pink and amber very tastefully. Or you may make the base of chocolate blanc-mange, by stirring a great spoonful of grated sweet chocolate into the gelatine and boiling milk.
Easter Eggs. (Very pretty.)
1 package Coxe’s gelatine, soaked four hours in one pint cold water.
2 heaping cups sugar.
3 large cups boiling milk.
2 table-spoonfuls grated chocolate—sweet, vanilla-flavored, if you can get it.
2 eggs, the yolks only.
A little prepared cochineal, or bright-red syrup.
Empty shells of 12 eggs, from which the contents have been drained through a hole in the small end.
Essence bitter-almond, grated lemon-peel, and rose-water for flavoring.
Put sugar and soaked gelatine into a bowl, and pour the boiling milk over them. Set over the fire in a farina-kettle, and stir until dissolved. Strain and divide into four parts. Leave one white; stir into another the beaten yolks; into a third the chocolate; into the fourth the pink or scarlet coloring. Season the chocolate with vanilla; the yellow with lemon; the white with rose-water, the red with bitter-almond. Heat the yellow over the fire long enough to cook the egg. Rinse out your egg-shells with cold water, and fill with the various mixtures, three shells of each. Set upright in a pan of meal or flour to keep them steady, and leave until next day. Then fill a glass bowl more than three-quarters full, with nice wine-jelly, broken into sparkling fragments. Break away the egg-shells, bit by bit, from the blanc-mange. If the insides of the shells have been properly rinsed and left wet, there will be no trouble about this. Pile the vari-colored “eggs” upon the bed of jelly, lay shred preserved orange-peel, or very finely shred candied citron about them, and surprise the children with them as an Easter-day dessert.
It is well to make this the day on which you bake cake, as the contents of the egg-shells will not then be wasted. By emptying them carefully, you can keep the whites and yolks separate.
This dish, which I invented to please my own little ones on the blessed Easter-day, is always welcomed by them with such delight, that I cannot refrain from recommending its manufacture to other mothers. It is by no means difficult or expensive. If you can get green spinach, you can have yet another color by using the juice.