Pinterest Project: Homemade Fruit Snacks Tutorial

I have a friend who recently let me taste some of her homemade fruit snacks. I couldn't believe how tasty they were. When I asked for the recipe, she told me to look on her food board on Pinterest.


The Pinterest inspiration

So, I checked out the recipe and decided to try it for myself. Turns out, they are really easy to make. I mean, there are only three ingredients, and they take ten minutes from start to finish!

Your three ingredients are gelatin, honey, and lemon juice. In addition, you need some flexible silicone molds. These molds are usually used for ice cubes or candy making. I found mine in the party aisle at Walmart for fifty cents each.

To start, you combine 3 tablespoons of gelatin, 3 tablespoons of honey, and 1/3 cup of lemon juice in a sauce pan and stir it regularly over low heat. You will know when it's done when it goes from being thick and chunky to smooth and runny.

Transfer the heated mix to a bowl with a pouring spout. I used a glass measuring cup.

Then you have to carefully fill the silicone molds. I avoided filling them all the way to the top because it's such a pain to fix an accidental overflow. To give you an idea how far the mix will go, I filled all three of my molds with this one batch.

Before you do anything else, I recommend immediately putting your saucepan, whisk, and measuring cup in the sink to soak so that the gelatin doesn't harden. Soaking breaks up the sticky mix so that clean up is a lot easier.

Your molds then need to sit in your freezer for five to ten minutes for hardening.

When they come out of the freezer, the fruit snacks can be pushed and peeled out of the molds. Like jello, they will be solid at room temperature after coming out of the cold.

I had so much fun making the lemon fruit snacks, I decided to experiment with other flavors. For lime fruit snacks, I substituted the lemon juice with lime juice. For orange fruit snacks, I used orange juice, but found that the orange flavor was a little weak. I'm going to have to come up with a way to get a more concentrated orange flavor. For strawberry, raspberry, and mango fruit snacks, I pureed frozen fruit in a blender so that it amounted to about 1/3 cup. I found that the mix was a little too thick with the pureed fruits, so I added a little lemon juice to thin it out, and that worked great.

I think my favorite flavor is the raspberry because it even has the little raspberry seeds trapped in the fruit snack. My husband's favorite flavor is the mango, by far.

I'm trying to think of other flavors to try. Banana? That doesn't really sound good. Watermelon? I think the flavor would be really weak, like the orange. Suggestions?