Bouncy protein jellies

A couple of months ago I was moaning on Twitter about my hair being crazy and someone suggested I try taking collagen/gelatin. I bought some Great Lakes Collagen Hydrolysate, which is water soluble and totally tasteless. Two tablespoons in my coffee in the morning and two in my tea at night. Easy, peasy.

Then not so long ago I was moaning on Instagram (see a pattern here?? 😉 about most protein powders being full of sugar and someone suggested nothing other than the Collagen Hydrolysate I already had in my cupboard. I checked the nutritional info and my 4 tablespoons a day is 22 grams of protein!

It’s not a massive amount but it’s so easy to consume since it’s totally tasteless.

Then I got thinking – if it’s got protein and if gelatin is good for your hair and nails and probably wrinkles as well – why not get creative with it?

Enter another product I quite like and one that my kids love as well:

This stuff is basically fruit juice + stevia.  The kids love the blackcurrant one and think their mother has finally started letting them drink ‘Ribena’ 🙂

Anyway, Stur is really sweet and combined with water and some gelatin, regular kind, it makes great little jellies:

And combine gelatin with mango smoothie (and a bit of honey) and you have fun little mango jellies:

I’m discovering there are so many fun ways to use gelatin, check out this website for example.

By the way, I don’t like complicated cooking and I always though messing with gelatin was fiddly and complicated. Turns out it’s not – you just heat a cup of water, making sure it doesn’t start to boil, whisk in about 4-5 tablespoons of gelatin (measure it out beforehand as you need to dump it in at once and start whisking) and then add another 2 cups of juice or smoothie and some honey (if you want fussy kids to eat it).  Pour the mixture into a dish greased with a bit of coconut oil or butter and it sets within 15 minutes.

I calculated that my mango jellies make about 30 little pieces (1 inch x 1.5 inches) and each piece has about 14g of protein. A nice little change from chewing on chicken every day 🙂