What are you doing this July 4th? As usual, we are throwing a party for friends and will be watching the Twilight Zone Marathon on SyFy. After a BBQ and our Patriotic Parfaits, we’ll head off to watch fireworks. Here’s a list of every place you can watch fireworks in Broward County.
This Independence Day, treat your family and friends to individual patriotic parfaits made from gelatin, instant pudding and non-dairy topping. They’re light and creamy, so delicious and gluten-free. Even those who are not big fans of gelatin seem to love this dessert. You just might want to make it an annual tradition in your home.
Ingredients
- 1 3 oz. box of berry flavored (blue) gelatin
- 1 3 oz. box of strawberry or cherry flavored (red) gelatin
- 2 3 oz. boxes of vanilla flavored instant pudding
- 1 16 oz. carton of non-dairy topping, such as Cool Whip
- 1 cup boiling hot water, divided
- 1 cup ice cold water, divided
- 1 1/2 cups of skim milk
- Blue food coloring
- Red food coloring
- 6 large strawberries
- Red, white & blue sprinkles (optional)
- Mini toothpick flags for decoration
You’ll need 3 mixing bowls, a whisk, a measuring cup and 6 wine glasses or goblets.
Make the Gelatin
Place blue gelatin powder in a bowl and whisk in 1/2 cup of hot water, mixing for a minute or two until gelatin is dissolved. Quickly add ice water and whisk briskly until gelatin starts to bubble and foam. Place the bowl in the refrigerator. Repeat these steps for the red gelatin and place bowl in the refrigerator. After 15 minutes, take the bowls out of the fridge and whisk each one so the gelatin does not harden too much along the sides and bottom of the bowls. Make sure you use a clean whisk each time so you do not start to mix the blue and red colors. Place the bowls back into the fridge for 20 more minutes.
Make the Pudding
Empty the two packages of instant pudding in a bowl Mix in the skim milk and whisk it all together until smooth. (The pudding will be much thicker than you would normally make it, because you are using much less milk for this recipe than the package directions calls for.) Place the bowl in the fridge for 10 minutes.
Mix it Together
After gelatin has been chilling for 20 minutes, take all 3 bowls out of the fridge. Put 1/2 of the pudding mixture into the blue gelatin and the other half into the red gelatin. (If the pudding is so thick that it is hard to whisk, you can add a small amount of water or more milk to it before adding it to the gelatin. But do not add too much to make it thin or runny.) The pudding is yellow and will change the color of the gelatin a bit, making the red a lighter pink and the blue a tad green. Add 1 even cup of non-dairy topping to each bowl and whisk that with the gelatin and pudding until smooth. At this point you can add several drops of red food coloring to the red gelatin mixture and several drops of blue to the blue gelatin, to create stronger colors. Chill the red and blue gelatin mixtures for 20 more minutes.
Assemble the Parfaits
Line up six parfait glasses. Place an equal amount of blue gelatin mixture at the bottom of all the glasses. Top each with 2 heaping tablespoons of non-dairy topping. Take care to keep the ingredients from mixing together; you want to see the distinct layers of the parfait. Top each white layer with equal amounts of red gelatin mixture. Then top off all the parfaits with a dollop of non dai