Homemade Fruit Snacks

   Recently I was on Pinterest posting some of my jewelry and looking for recipes and found this recipe for fruit snacks. I love finding recipes of snacks my family loves. You can leave out flavors you don't like, make extra of the flavors you love and most of the time they taste better than the store bought snacks. We have a fruit snack expert in my family so when I found this recipe I decided I had to try it.
     I'm not sure why I didn't take a picture of all of the ingredients like I usually do but you need:

1/3 cup water

2 packets of unflavored gelatin

1 package of any flavor of gelatin

 

   First pour the water in a small saucepan and sprinkle gelatin packets over the water.

 





 

    Heat the mixture over medium heat and stir frequently until all of the geltin is dissolved completely.

 

   Next spoon the mixture into molds. Since I was experimenting, I used the icetrays from the motorhome. I also used my minimuffin tray to make some skinnier ones that worked well, too. (I'll explain more about molds further down).

 

 

   While you're spooning the mixture into the molds, keep the saucepan tilted. The mixture starts to set up fast so you want to keep it pooled as much as possible, this also makes it easier to spoon out the mixture. I also noticed using the smallest saucepan in my set worked the best.

 

You'll notice the fruit snacks you buy in the store are small and thin, I found they are that size for a reason. Too thick makes it feel kind of like chewing plastic at first and too big around, they flop around in your mouth. The icetrays were a little too think and the mini muffin trays were a little too big round. I ordered some bite size candy molds that are going to work great.

    After about 20 minutes, you can remove the fruit snacks from the molds. Place the fruitsnacks on a piece of wax paper to let them finish setting up and dry. I also noticed the icetrays were harder to get the snacks out. I tried spraying 1 batch with a little cooking spray and it worked great! I was worried it would leave a grease film on the snacks, but it really didn't.

    The thicker molds made the fruitsnacks sweat a little so they needed to sit awhile so they wouldn't stick to each other. Once in awhile, the bottom/wider end of the fruit snacks were still a little  sticky and kept sticking to each other so I put a little powdered sugar on the sticky side while it set up and it wasn't sticky anymore and it didn't change the taste of the fruit snack at all. I will warn you, the grape flavored snacks make you crave grape KoolAid. When I first poured the grape gelatin in the water the smell made me want the KoolAid and then once these purple icecubed shaped snacks were sitting there, I REALLY wanted some grape KoolAid.

I made every flavor I had in my pantry and ran to the store for a couple more. Since I was hanging out with the family's fruitsnack expert yesterday, I put each flavor in a baggie and labeled them (there were 2 reds so I had to make sure I knew which was which) so she could decide which flavors to keep and which ones to leave out.

 

On the drive home, the expert and I had a meeting. We decided which flavors worked and which flavors didn't. Flavors to keep on hand at all times in case of any fruit snack emergencies are: Grape (need to get some grape KoolAid, too), Cherry, Strawberry and Orange. Flavors that weren't too bad were: Lime and Berry Blue. Flavors to not do again are: Lemon and Peach (Peach smelled awesome but there was no taste at all). The meeting was adjourned and she took a nap.

 



 

   If you have any fruit snack questions for the expert, please leave a comment and I will be happy to consult her and get you an answer as quick as possible (as long as I can fit it into her busy schedule).