BFC’s Substitute COTW, (Belated) Thanksgiving Boogaloo

Sharkbait is off today, something about drinking his face off until he fights finds a Gallagher brother. I guess my name is filler. I’ve been called worse.

As many of you know, we are fully in the holiday season now. Just a few weeks ago was Thanksgiving, and I decided to try something new in the cocktail arena.  It has cranberries like Sharky’s last post. But unlike his last post, it also has failure.

Before we delve into the action, let me start by saying that my wife is one of the ~187M Americans who prefer canned cranberry product to homemade cranberry sauce. That means that no matter whose family is hosting Thanksgiving dinner, there will always be a can of the gelatinous stuff. Combined with me stumbling across this Instagram reel about two weeks before Thanksgiving, it became obvious what I needed to do: make cranberry jello shots in a fucking can log form and make my family eat them.

And then….I fucked it up. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, let’s look at our recipe.

5 cups fresh cranberries

3 cups sugar

1 cup water (plus some for the gelatin)

1 orange, juiced

1 packet of gelatin

3 strips of orange peel

1 sprig of sage

1 packet (1/4 ounce) gelatin powder

2 ounces gin (I used Bombay Sapphire)

3/4 ounce Grand Marnier

Simple enough, right? Combine all the non booze/non gelatin ingredients, strain that shit, add gelatin, add booze, pour into empty can, refrigerate, get festively sloshed.

It should come out looking like this

And instead it turned out like this

Seriously, there’s no point in me sharing a photo of the end product, and not only because I forgot to take one. It was loose and slimy (like your mom). And it was supposed to be jiggly and drool-inducing, like Kate Upton.

I have a few hunches on what might have gone wrong:

1. Not enough gelatin. Even though I followed the recipe, I had a hunch it was too liquidy.
2. Speaking of, I think I added too much orange juice. One of my family’s Thanksgiving traditions is to make sweet potatoes inside scooped out orange shells topped with marshmallows. Yes, they’re fucking delicious and yes, I’m the one on the hook for the hard labor the years we visit my folks for turkey day. So I used freshly scooped out oranges for the juice and may have gone beyond “one” orange by virtue of the fact the guts I was juicing were in a big Tupperware tub filled to the brim with oranges.
3. I may have added more booze than the recipe called for. One drink’s worth did not see, like enough but clearly that added more liquid I needed to account for in regards to gelatin.
4. I didn’t let that shit cool before adding the booze. Whoops.

All of those are understandable mistakes, but they are mistakes nonetheless. In the end, I threw some of those failed Jell-O shots into a cocktail shaker with a little more gin and fresh lime juice, shook the hell out of it, and ended up with a tart, somewhat chewy, and slightly too sweet cocktail. Do not recommend. HOWEVA I think it’s important to share our failures. They’re not only what makes us human, they’re a reminder that the perfectly curated social media presentation isn’t real, and failures are the things that teach us lessons. Also I will absolutely try this again next year, and more than one day before thanksgiving so I have time to recover if I fuck it up again. Caveat emptor if you want to give it a go for Jesus’s birthday.