What a long way we’ve come from the gelatin mold craze of the 40s, 50s and 60s that produced such culinary delights as the Garden Salad Mold seen above. I love the photographs and the recipes make me giggle, but I can’t imagine serving what appears to be jelly encased barf at a dinner party. Visit the ridiculously funny Gallery of Regrettable Foods for such great pictorials as Knox Gelatin as Seen on TV! and Jell-O Confronts the Depression.

What got me started on this wiggly path was the fantastic personalized gelatin mold posted by the lovely ladies over at Cool Mom Picks. Come on, molded Jell-O with your name on it - how great is that! And then delicio.us featured the equally ingenious happy birthday molds, with each letter being it own, stand-alone dessert. Pretty cool for the kid that doesn’t care for cake (although personally I don’t know any of those kids). Both are from the great Brit shop urchin where you’ll find they’re called ‘jelly moulds.’

And then over at Moudlings they have a whole cavalcade of molds, a few of which strike me as having a kind of seventies feel to them. Super cute and sized for individual servings. Of course they’re perfect for Jell-O, but the shop also shows them being used to mold Rice Krispy Treats and I imagine they could even make charming mounds of rice - although you’d lose a little of the detail. At $3.00 a pop, how can you go wrong?

And lest you think gelatin molds are strictly for the short set, may I introduce the work of San Francisco based artist Liz Hickok. She describes her recent series San Francisco in Jello this way:

“This project consists of photographs and video, which depict various San Francisco landscapes. I make the landscapes by constructing scale models of the architectural elements which I use to make molds. I then cast the buildings in Jell-O. Similar to making a movie set, I add backdrops, which I often paint, and elements such as mountains or trees, and then I dramatically light the scenes from the back or underneath. The Jell-O sculptures quickly decay, leaving the photographs and video as the remains.”

lt just makes me so stupidly happy.

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