Original Recipe:

• 1 small tin apricots
• 1 pint packet greengage jelly
• 3 bananas
• A little whipped cream

Make the jelly in the usual way and put into a large shallow bowl to set,
Cut the bananas into halves and stand upright at regular intervals in the jelly.
Drain the apricots from the syrup and place one apricot on each banana to form a mushroom.
Then put a little whipped cream on each mushroom to cover it and serve.

Okay, I was working from memory here, and I only had the one banana. I had to use lime jelly instead of Greengage (though it seems to be available in South Africa, it has fallen out of favour here)

It seemed to me that putting one apricot half atop a half banana would look kind of wrong (though it would have probably been easier to balance the apricots on top that way.. slipperly little blighters)

And I was supposed to have spread cream over my mushroom tops, but I like my dots of whipped cream better anyway.

It tasted good. Pretty much as you would expect from the ingredients, like fruit salad, jelly and cream. Trifle-ish overtones; I think I’ll have to find a trifle recipe in here somewhere.

Original recipe:

• 1 packet red jelly* crystals
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1/2 cup rice

Cook rice in water, turn into colander, rinse well under the tap and drain.
Make the jelly and pour over the rice in a glass dish and set.

*Jello

Before…
Well, this looks like it will taste like jelly with rice set in it. Not sure what the sugar is for, but I put it in with the jelly crystals anyway to make up for the ones I ate. I didn’t have red jelly crystals; we must make do with purple ones.

After…
Um… I have problems with this. I think I have cognitive dissonance when it comes to having to chew jelly. It’s a bit like if you ate some rice and then some jelly and had the whole mess rebound on you.

Maybe there’s a generation gap in attitudes when it comes to food set in gelatine.