Happy New Year! Bye, 2018, hello 2019! Hopefully everyone will have a good year, or at the very least, one you can bear. I’m sharing my recipe of coffee jelly, which we had as part of the New Year celebration food. Really though, it’s such an easy dessert (just takes time, as jellies do) that there is no reason why you couldn’t have it more often than that!
Since you want a good firm jelly, you’ll want less liquid . Dissolve the clear gelatin in the recommended amount, and half the amount of liquid that they recommend for the juice. You’ll want a strong coffee too, so keep that in mind. This is a rather personalised preference though, so you’ll have to experiment with how strong and how sweet you want the coffee. I used 1 1/2 measuring tablespoons of coffee and 3 of sugar per package of jelly. Since the cream will be sweet, you can choose to have coffee as black as a starless night (and visually it’ll be amazing!) with only a touch of sweet, but you don’t want the coffee to be very bitter.
Once you’ve got your jelly nice and firm (I left it overnight, not intentionally though, things got busy in the house) slice into cubes.
Mix together 600 ml of heavy or thick cream and a 295g can of sweet condensed milk, and pour into a large casserole dish. Add the coffee jelly cubes and stir.
Now you have two options – put the dish away as it is and leave it for a few hours for the flavor to develop, or mix up another two packages of clear, flavorless jelly, let it cool to room temp and gently stir that into the whole thing, mixing it thoroughly through the cream so you have coffee cathedral windows!
Believe me, both sounded equally appealing, but for the New Years dessert, since I prepared this three days in advance, I went the cathedral windows route.
Incidentally, that’s how one makes cathedral windows – Very firm coloured jelly in 3 or 4 different colours, flavoured perhaps with vanilla or with compatible flavoured jellies, cut into cubes, and placed into a sweet cream jelly. Have fun!