Jello Cookies! Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Pinterest.

So Pinterest seems to be a dumping ground for anything vaguely pretty. I dunno about you, but my feed is full of wedding, decor, schmaltzy inspiration, food, tattoos, and WWII imagery (I suspect the last one is an outlier). I, of course, am primarily there for the food. Ideally, I use Pinterest as a tightly organized set of lists for things I would like to make at some point. I don’t get the habits that others have of repinning anything vaguely pretty – if I can’t put it to use at some point, I don’t want it on any of my boards. My pet peeve is pins where, if you click the link, it takes you to someplace only tangentially related to the pin at best.

Anyhow, I recently decided I should start using some of my pins. I’d come across a recipe for jello sugar cookies awhile back and, as I had an excess of jello, I decided that now was a good time to attempt said jello cookies. I was super happy with the results, so lemme tell you a bit more about the process!

So here’s the ingredients you’ll need:

1/2 cup shortening
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 3oz. package of Jell-O
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
sugar for rolling
sugar sprinkles for rolling

So, you put the first four ingredients in a bowl (shortening, butter, sugar, and jello). It’ll look something like this:

Next, cream the eggs and vanilla into the mix.

After that, slowly dump in the rest of your ingredients and mix them as well. I’m a total bum and never bother to sift things, so when I get to the step in recipes where you’re supposed to sift your flour with other things (like baking soda and salt, for example), I generally ignore that. I pretend sifting doesn’t matter, and instead blend in the non-flour ingredients first super well, and then blend in the flour afterwords. In theory it’ll be well mixed?

Anyhow, your dough will be super neon bright, it’s pretty sweet. I went with cherry flavored jello, and that resulted in that awesome orangish red you see above.

So at this point, go ahead and preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. You’ll want to get a bowl and pour a respectable amount of sugar into it (about 1/2 cup). Roll your dough into balls, and roll those balls in said sugar before placing on a pan.

Get something flat-surfaced like a jar, and use that to squish the balls down to a nice disk size. After that, grab whatever fancy sugar sprinkles you have lying around, sprinkle some onto your disks, and squash again to ensure said sprinkles don’t fall off your cookies during the baking process.

Bake these bad boys for 6-8 minutes, closer to 6 if you like’em soft and closer to 8 if you like’em crispy. And, then you have deliciousness!

So I got all crazy and decided to sprinkle some chocolate chips into some of the batter. I figured, hey, cherry flavor + chocolate chips = amazing, right? And they were decent, but really, the jello alone was enough. Jello is some powerful stuff, and these cookies stand on their own without needing additional ingredients to spruce them up.

I was pretty happy with how these came out, and would totally make them again. These are actually a great cookie to make if you have a reason to make a bunch of cookies, like for a bake sale or for Christmas. You can use multiple different flavors of Jello, and for a bake sale just wrap one of each color together in clear cellophane or in sandwich bags with a colorful ribbon or something, and I bet their visual appeal will make them sell super well.

Or, for Christmas you can package them in ex-Pringles containers like this – yet another thing I’ve pinned on Pinterest that I have yet to try!