Molded Cranberry Fruit Salad

Molded Cranberry Fruit Salad

printable version

The back of the recipe card says "Copied by Lauren".  The handwriting on the entire card is unfamiliar to me, as is the name Lauren.  Oddly the "Copied by..." is in a different handwriting which is also not familiar to me.  That to me is more mysterious than the mystery substance that was spilled on the card - it does not seem to be cranberry or lemon colored.

Pandemic buying - I was so happy to see canned pineapple and knew I had a recipe that could use it so I bought a can.  Only this morning did I realize I bought sliced and not crushed.  So I had to search around on the internet and figure out that an 8oz can of crushed pineapple has 1/3 c. juice and 2/3 c. pineapple.  

I got the real juice cocktail but the Walmart brand of cranberry.

Bottled lemon juice is one of those essentials to have in the fridge - I almost never use "fresh-squeezed" lemon juice.

The recipe didn't state Sugar Free gelatin but that was what a 3 oz. pkg. was in today's world.  Who knows when this recipe was written and how big jell-o boxes were back then.

While I waited for the liquid to boil I mixed up the cranberry sauce.  It was important to dig deep and turn over to make sure all the chunks with can imprints on them got mixed well.  I think I still missed one or two small parts.

Usually when I make jell-o I put the dry powder in a container and pour the hot water over it and stir (the box says 2 minutes so that's what I do).  This recipe said to put the powder in the liquid and stir until "completely dissolved".  I put the jell-o in the Tupperware mix-n-pour and poured the liquid in then mixed for 2 mins.

The cranberry was completely submerged in the liquid.

I decided to finally chop my pineapple rings until I got 2/3 c.  

It was 4 rings worth.  I added chopped celery on top to reach 1 cup.  (The recipe calls for 1/2 c. chopped celery but we are not a crunch-jell-o kind of people so I figured less might be more in this case.)

The box says when adding fruit that you should chill for 1 1/2 hours first.  I think this is the first time in my life I have added fruit to jell-o and I've never made a mold.  I was nervous about catching it at just the right time.  I checked on it a couple of times and by 25 minutes it was already starting to cling to the side.  I figured it was better to add it too early than too late.

I stirred it up and realized that most of the firmer areas that I had noticed when I wiggled the pitcher were the cranberry sauce. 

For over a decade I had a Tupperware Jell-o mold on top of my pantry that my brother-in-law had left behind when he moved out.  As previously stated, I've never made a mold and didn't intend to so I think I finally got rid of it a year or two ago.  I used my Bundt pan as a mold.  There seemed to be an unequal distribution of the celery and pineapple so I drug around with the spoon to sort of even it out.  I still wasn't totally pleased with the distribution but I didn't want to stir too much because I don't know the science of jell-o but figured the movement could generate heat that could un-do the molding that had already started.

I had to look up how to unmold a jell-o mold.  Set it in hot water for about 30 seconds.  The instructions I found said less but it wasn't enough.  After the initial dip I went around it with a spatula to loosen it which seemed loose so I flipped it onto a plate but even after a minute it hadn't dropped.  So I put it back in hot water for a full 30 seconds and re-spatula-ed and then it dropped out onto the plate.  Per the online instructions I put it back in the fridge to re-firm up before dinner.

I was not as put off by the pineapple or the celery (I really expected to NOT like the celery).  BUT - the whole thing was SUPER sweet.  I find normal jellied cranberry sauce a little too sweet and this was beyond the normal.