Jello Cookies

I know.  I haven't posted in almost a month!  There are a few reasons for that.  First, even though I have a few things that I haven't shared yet, I don't bake as much in the summer (I might have mentioned this last time, too), so I'm trying to space things out so that I can continue to post on a somewhat regular basis.  Also, if you know me in real life, you know that I have a really difficult time sharing my recipes with people.  I don't care if you're my mother, my best friend or a stranger on the street - I'm happy that you love my cooking, but the second you ask me for the recipe, I get all weird and clammy.   You can see how it's difficult for someone like that to have a blog where they share their favorite recipes.

The other reason I haven't posted - and trust me, this one is more important and way cooler - is that I think I finally have a way to get Elfie's Edibles off the ground.  I don't want to jinx it and I don't have any details to really talk about it, but, if I'm going to regularly be baking for strangers, I'm not sure how I feel about posting the actual recipes.  Pictures and stories, sure, but I'm not sure what benefit would be in it for me if my customers can easily find and reproduce (or at least try to reproduce) whatever I just made for them.  I know I'm walking a very fine line, here, but I think I can manage it - with your patience and input, of course!

Now that that's out of the way, I want to share something I made with you!  There's no actual recipe for this one, as I've seen about a million different versions floating around on Facebook and on Pinterest.  These Jello cookies kept popping up everywhere and they looked and sounded delicious, so I felt like I had to try to make them.  I looked at a few different recipes and they're all pretty much the same, so I just made whatever one I found at the time.

Whatever recipe you choose, these are REALLY easy to make!  After you make the dough, divide it into a number of smaller amounts based on the different flavors of Jello you have.  Add a few tablespoons to each smaller portion of dough, mix thoroughly and bake for about 8 minutes.  When they come out of the oven, tap the tops of each cookie with the bottom of a glass to flatten them out a little, and voila! Jello cookies!

NOTE: here's an easy way to make these:, make chocolate chip cookie dough.  Omit the chocolate chips and brown sugar, and use increase the flour by 1 cup.  Drop by rounded spoonful or roll into balls, then bake at 350°F for about 9 minutes.  They will spread out, so make sure you leave some space between them!

Here's the thing: these cookies are super sweet.  My recipe said to roll the dough balls into the extra Jello before baking, and I easily could have skipped that step and still had tons of the Jello flavor.  I guess I never realized just how sweet Jello is, because you could easily cut back a little on the sugar, and the cookies wouldn't suffer.  You can add a little food coloring to increase the color vibrancy if you want, but I found it wasn't necessary.  I used 3 tablespoons of each flavor and let the Jello sit on top of the dough for a couple of minutes before I mixing it in, so maybe that's why my colors were so bright.

As you can see from the picture, I made four different flavors: grape, lime, orange and cherry.  The grape was my least favorite, and I think I actually liked the orange the best.  If you put a small scoop of vanilla ice cream between two of the orange cookies, it sort of takes like a creamsicle :)

Since I saw these mostly on Facebook and have had mixed results with Pinterest, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect.  But, I was pleasantly surprised with how these came out!

What's the last recipe you made that you found on Facebook?