The bright (and not-so-bright) side of making Jell-O cookies
Jell-O and cookies are two super kid-friendly desserts, but what happens when you combine them?
A few weeks ago, a reader emailed about Jell-O cookies she’d seen in an Arizona newspaper that she thought me and my boys might like to try for a summer project. I picked up some JellO on a slow weekend day and we set out to try this somewhat weird combination.
The recipe is a simple sugar cookie recipe, but some of the sugar is replaced with the JellO. The original recipe said you could halve the recipe to make different colors, so that’s what I did, but I made the mistake of using the whole package of JellO in each. I was just trying not to waste half a pack of Jell-O, but looking back, I should have just tossed that extra 1 1/2 ounces because the resulting cookies — though cute — were too tart and sour to really enjoy. The cookies
do need that extra 1/2 cup of granulated sugar and even the decorative sugar (or, in our case, Skittles) to sweeten the treats.
Otherwise, this was a fun cookie to make! The dough has a nice texture to it that’s easy to roll and cut with the cookie cutters. The bright red color of the cherry JellO was more eye-popping than the grape flavor, and even though we didn’t like that first batch (because of my error), I’m going to try again with the lime Jell-O, just to see how the green turns out. You can just use food coloring to brighten up your sugar cookie dough.