I saw a recipe for jelly hearts in The Straits Times back in June and wanted to cut it out but forgot. Then Sharon, my cousin’s wife, presented me with the recipe for my birthday, as well as all the ingredients and equipment needed to make the jelly hearts!

Being the amazing procrastinator that I am, I only got around to making the jelly hearts a few days ago. It’s quite easy to make and the jelly hearts turned out really well! The only thing I would do differently the next time around is use fresh strawberries instead of frozen ones because the latter are quite mushy and don’t have a nice heart shape. They taste great though so it’s really for appearances’ sake!

I’ll list down the recipe here because it’s highly likely that I’ll lose the newspaper article cut-out.

Ingredients (according to the article):
9 McVitie’s Original Digestive biscuits, crushed
70g butter, melted
250g cream cheese, room temperature
295g condensed milk
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tsp gelatine
50ml hot water
1 punnet of strawberries (mine were frozen)
1 90g-box of Tortally raspberry-flavoured jelly crystals (I used Jell-O)

Method (according to what I did):

1. Crush biscuits until they look like fine bread crumbs. I put the biscuits into a big ziploc bag and got Anya to attack them with a rolling pin.
2. Add melted butter to crushed biscuits and mix well.
3. Pour biscuit mixture into square cake ring on a baking tray. Press down firmly and evenly.
4. Chill in fridge for at least an hour. I only waited 40 minutes.
5. In an electric mixer, beat cream cheese until smooth.
6. Add condensed milk and lemon juice. Continue to mix.
7. Dissolve gelatine in hot water. Strain. Add to cream cheese mixture and mix well.
8. Pour mixture on top of biscuit layer and spread evenly.
9. Cut strawberries in half. Trim if necessary.
10. Place strawberries on top of cream cheese mixture. Gently push into mixture.
11. Leave to set in fridge overnight. I waited about 8 hours.
12. Prepare and pour jelly solution over cheesecake. Put back into fridge to let jelly set.
13. Present to kids who are ravenous after a swimming class. Watch jelly hearts disappear.