The New York Pastry Chef Who Found Success With A Mesmerizing Jell-O Cake
Jell-O has reached a new level of popularity and artistry that the host of a 1950s dinner party could never have dreamed of. There's enough Jell-O content out there to fuel a popular corner of TikTok, also known as JelloTok, where you can scroll endlessly through a jiggly dreamscape of fruit shapes, rainbows, and peculiar experiments. As The New York Times declared in 2022, the world is obsessed with foods that wiggle and jiggle.
Jena Derman, who co-founded the Brooklyn-based business Solid Wiggles alongside mixologist Jack Schramm during the pandemic, is well aware of the trend. As a major player in the food's resurgence, she makes one of the world's silliest foods look like works of art.
Boozy "Jelly Cakes" — a gourmet, rococo take on the Jell-O shot — resemble blown-glass creations, complete with embedded edible flowers, fun patterns, and celestial colors that look as if they were beamed down from the cosmos. Derman told Food & Wine that fancy jelly is "both high art and as low as you can go." Here's a look inside her mesmerizing confections.
Not your mother's Jell-O
Unlike the package-made Jell-O you may have grown up eating, Jena Derman's jelly desserts are made from scratch. Not surprising, considering she's a former bread baker and pastry chef who cut her teeth at places like Milk Bar. Instead of the Kraft-Heinz powdered stuff, she uses sheet gelatin and organic fruit purées as a base. As for the beautiful flowers and shapes that float inside the treats, she fills a syringe with condensed milk-treated jelly and injects it using special pastry tips.
While many of the creations have alcohol in them, Solid Wiggles isn't exclusively interested in spiked shots. "We try to operate a space where we're not solely married to takes on classic cocktails, but also looking at anything like pastry or food for inspiration, too," Jack Schramm told Eater. The cakes (which are available for nationwide shipping through Goldbelly) only contain 5% alcohol.
The wonderful world of Solid Wiggles
The Solid Wiggles lineup is just as ephemeral as the cakes themselves. If you try a flavor that you're crazy about, there's a good chance it'll already be out of rotation by the time you're ready for seconds. The consolation? Each new cake menu seems to be more inventive than the last.
Jelly Cakes of the past include an aqua-blue "Showstopper" with Champagne, gin, lemon, and absinthe; a bright orange "Centerpiece" with Caribbean reserve scotch, orange, spiced cranberry, and brown sugar milk jelly; and a green "Stunner" with a lime jelly base, grapefruit juice, tequila jelly, and red and white blooms of milk jelly flowers.
As you might guess, mixing up the menu is half the fun for a company that eschews traditional desserts. As Jack Schramm told VinePair, "Everything is so serious and so heavy in the world right now, so this is a nice escape."