For the Pride Issue, we wanted to include some rainbow-centric recipes to celebrate the occasion. The weather is hot/windy/rainy/blustery/humid, so why not cool down with a delicious (and alcoholic) jelly shot?

The entire process takes about three hours total, but most of that is just the gelatin setting. There are three layers of gelatin, red, yellow, and blue. Each layer has one cup of alcohol in it, so these jellies do pack a punch. Be creative with your gelatin fruit flavor choices; there are a lot of new flavors out there that will work in this recipe. Recently I spotted apricot, grape, pineapple, and watermelon gelatin. Yum.

I did one batch with the original strawberry/cherry, lemon, and berry blue. In the other batch, I used watermelon, pineapple, and berry blue. The pineapple and watermelon was tastier and gave a better color spectrum.

Any size container or cup can be used, but a much larger or smaller container will affect how many servings the recipe yields.

This recipe was modified from one found in the Jelly Shot Test Kitchen blog.

Rainbow Jelly Shots

Makes 12-20 shots, depending on container

Supplies

Plastic cups, muffin tray, or other container Large mixing cup

For each layer

1 cup hot water 2 envelopes Knox gelatine 1 3 oz box of gelatin flavor: red/pink, yellow, blue 1 cup of favorite flavored clear liquor, Bacardi Limon rum used in this recipe Maraschino cherries (garnish)

Directions

Heat one cup of water to a mild boil and pour it into the mixing cup. Slowly stir in two packets of Knox gelatin, stirring until entirely dissolved.

Just a heads up, unflavored gelatin smells terrible when mixed with hot water. But it serves a purpose, the extra gelatin works as a thickening agent. The shots end up being kind of loose and watery without it, kind of like the jelly shots at house parties. Now you know the secret.

As this is the first layer, use your chosen red/pink flavor, in our case watermelon. Stir in entire packet until dissolved. Pour in one cup of clear liquor, we used Bacardi Limon rum but it is entirely up to you. The Bacardi rum tasted pretty good to the Creative Loafing staff during our taste test.

Before pouring the mixture, spray a little non-stick spray onto a paper towel and lightly coat the inside of each cup or container. This small step ensures that each jelly shot slips easily from the cup and into your mouth.

You should wait for the gelatin mixture to cool before pouring into the cups and that will reduce the frothy little bubbles that coagulate. After cooling, fill each cup or container about a third of the way. Put them on a tray, to help avoid spilling or tipping, and into the refrigerator.

Allow each later to completely set or it won’t be a total rainbow, just a sort-of-almost rainbow. It’s got booze in it so it’ll taste good no matter how the rainbow spectrum comes together, right? But seriously, wait until the jelly is completely set before adding a new layer. It will take an hour or less.

Repeat the above steps for the yellow, then blue layer. Once you pour the final layer, plop a cherry or garnishing fruit of choice into the top. To remove shots from cups, gently bend the sides of the cup to loosen the shot. Bottoms up!

This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2012.