Jello Worms

1 Posted by - October 19, 2012 - Food & Drink, Halloween & Autumn

Despite everything and the many (many, many… manymanymany, seriously MANY) times I’ve failed at kitchen stuff, I am ever-hopeful. I had visions of presenting this bowl of Jello worms to everyone at a party to a chorus of gags and ewwws.

Image from Instructables

And, really, it all started well enough. Even I can handle mixing Jello.

And when it came time to pour it in the straws, I figured I had the tutorial beat because no one had thought about using beer glasses as the straw holders. BOOM.

I mean, yeah, there were a few hitches along the way. I had gel food coloring, and I’ve never used gel food coloring before, and I had no idea how much of that you use to equate to “15 drops.” (I guessed. Big surprise, I know.)

But, really, once I poured these things and stuck them in the refrigerator to set overnight, I had high hopes. As long as no one made a mad grab for the apple cider in the middle of the night and tipped them over, all would be well.

And then I woke up the next morning and ran immediately to the kitchen, like a kid on Christmas. (What? You didn’t run immediately to the kitchen on Christmas morning?)

Once I took all the straws out of one of the glasses, I was ready to begin.

I’d read up on several ways to get the worms out of the straws and decided to try what I’d deemed the least invasive tactic first: holding the worms over hot water and just letting them “fall right out.”

Yeah.

Then I tried the rolling pin method: roll them out of the straws slowly and carefully with a rolling pin. This gave marginally better results.

I did say marginally, didn’t I?

I tried extracting them by surgically slicing the straw with a very sharp knife, but I only tried it once before I had visions of an emergency room trip without a bra on, so that didn’t last long.

I squeezed a few of them out with just my fingers. I’ve never had to help a cow give birth, but now I can imagine it, complete with slimy red substance oozing everywhere. My kitchen floor is going to be sticky for weeks.

In short, nothing worked, and after about twenty minutes of fruitless effort, I gave up and threw those fuckers away.

Sigh. Another one bites the dust. But I actually don’t feel that bad about it because the most ideal result still would have left me with a bowl full of gross-looking shit.

48 Comments

  • CindyC873 October 19, 2012 - 9:55 am Reply

    I made these last year…yup, they looked about like yours! :o)

  • ChristinaCameronNetta October 19, 2012 - 10:00 am Reply

    The top picture looks like Hannibal Lecter had a field day with someone’s intestines. Add some fava beans and you’re good to go.

  • liz mk October 19, 2012 - 10:10 am Reply

    The person who wrote that tutorial is an asshole. They left out the part where they went to the store and purchased jiggly worms from the candy aisle.

  • AmandaAllmanPrince October 19, 2012 - 10:50 am Reply

    Pintester, I’m definitely more grossed out by yours than the original, yours kind of look like intestinal parasites. I say, mission accomplished!

  • dminniswhite68 October 19, 2012 - 10:50 am Reply

    I have made these also with marginal success. I think I only had enough to lay across a pan of “dirt.” It helped a little to wrap the straws in Press N Seal wrap at the bottom to keep some of the liquid from oozing out the bottom into the glass, but extraction was way too tedious, and I enjoy tedious jobs.

  • ErinHanlon October 19, 2012 - 11:15 am Reply

    i recently watched the entire series of Dr. 90210 on netflix. this reminds me a lot of that.

  • ThisSillyGirlsLife October 19, 2012 - 11:15 am Reply

    LOL, this had Fail written all over it.
    http://ThisSillyGirlsLife.com

  • KasieStrickland October 19, 2012 - 11:40 am Reply

    A valiant effort.

  • QuillJa October 19, 2012 - 12:05 pm Reply

    EEEEWWWWWWW!! DIY gummy worms? That’s just wrong.

  • Jenna P October 19, 2012 - 12:10 pm Reply

    Had a feeling about that one.

  • 2boymom09 October 19, 2012 - 12:20 pm Reply

    We made these this summer, couldnt get them out either

  • Truffles8761 October 19, 2012 - 2:15 pm Reply

    Don’t get me wrong.  I enjoy your failures immensely and I wouldn’t change a thing…for you.  I did wonder if spraying the straws with cooking spray would make removal any easier.  I didn’t wonder enough to try it myself.  Maybe someone who isn’t as bone-idle as I am will give that a go and get back to me.

  • CrystalKYuhhyzaguirre October 19, 2012 - 4:00 pm Reply

    I made these last year. The ones i successfully removed did look like the ones in the picture, but a lot of them broke. And I had really sore fingers from squeezing them out. And they tasted like shit.

  • Mommybailey October 19, 2012 - 5:35 pm Reply

    i have a solution for you, although it doesn’t have anything to do with the worms. it’s for your sticky floor. it starts with a “m” and ends with an “op”. Tah daaaah!!!

    • Christine G October 22, 2012 - 9:06 am Reply

      Mommybailey I see what you did there… My suggestion in this case starts with a “d” and ends in an “og”.

    • BobbieJoWilliamsHardy October 25, 2012 - 1:34 am Reply

      Mommybailey I also have a suggestion. Get a towel laying in your floor, come on, everyone has one, and spray winded on the floor and drag your feet with the towel! You know you’ve done it before. Or just wear shoes, it’s not as bad as long as your feet aren’t bare!

  • HeatherBunchWilliams October 19, 2012 - 7:45 pm Reply

    I’m curious…did you use an extra packet of plain gelatin in your mix?  The few tutorials I’ve seen with recipes say to include extra gelatin to firm them up more…

    • Pintester October 22, 2012 - 10:24 pm Reply

      HeatherBunchWilliams I did, indeed.

  • mustaddfabricsoftener October 19, 2012 - 10:35 pm Reply

    I’ve seen other fails for this, so I had a pretty good idea of how it was going to turn out. Adding an extra packet of gelatin sounds like it might be worth a shot, though.

  • JoyLuVasquez October 19, 2012 - 10:56 pm Reply

    I’ve helped a cow give birth before…. Had my head way to close to the back end of a bovine for comfort. Although there was no squeezing or rolling pins involved, there was plenty of substances of varying colors oozing out of orifaces, and onto unsuspected sweet ladies who have to have one arm up the cows Vageen to pull the calf out…. Well that was an unpleasant flashback, Thank you for making these Jello worm sso I don’t have to now… and I had planned on it for this weekend

    • Truffles8761 October 19, 2012 - 11:25 pm Reply

      JoyLuVasquez Trust me when I tell you that was an unpleasant flashback for all of us. And I’ve never had my arm up a cow’s “vageen”.  But hey, thanks for the visuals.  lol.

      • JoyLuVasquez October 20, 2012 - 1:30 am Reply

        Truffles8761 JoyLuVasquez  If I have to suffer the mental torture of it, you all must as well…

  • rjeffers83 October 20, 2012 - 12:56 pm Reply

    Your version looks like straight up ground beef right out of the meat grinder.  Just throw a bag of gummy worms in a bowl  and call it a day. Who doesn’t like eating gummy worms?  Nobody.  Who doesn’t like eating something that looks like raw meat?  Anyone with working eyeballs.

  • SherriPate October 20, 2012 - 5:56 pm Reply

    Perhaps a bigger straw and more gelatin, like someone had mentioned previously. Collect a bunch of McDonalds straws and that might work 😀

  • TiffanyLacasse October 20, 2012 - 7:36 pm Reply

    Yeah, the original version itself is gross. I don’t know when I became such a baby about worms but they gross me out and I wouldn’t be eating jello in worm form. That just doesn’t sound appealing.

  • IoffendReason October 20, 2012 - 7:51 pm Reply

    Awww – I’m SORRY! I thought this would have worked. Mah baaaad… I’ll find a better one I promise! xo Lizzie

  • ShelbyHogan October 21, 2012 - 1:36 am Reply

    I have never seen these before, but I’m a little disturbed that not only a lot of people have, but there are many, many ways to fail it. As some wise people already posted, just buy some fucking gummy worms and call it a day. Jesus.

  • MickiSheppard October 22, 2012 - 12:11 am Reply

    I have seen this pinned a thousand times!  And each time I think to myself: “how in the hell are you supposed to get those fuckers out of the straw?”  I say leave ’em in and just call it a jello shot!  JUST SUCK IT!

  • TraceyArsenault October 22, 2012 - 7:36 am Reply

    I made these one year and had a once successfully extracted worm  for every 10 little slimy b*stard that would not come out of the straw in one piece!

  • Christine G October 22, 2012 - 9:16 am Reply

    I haven’t bothered to read the original Pin that you’ve tested, but would it possibly have less failness with one of those massive bubble-tea straws? Of course it would probably look even less like a worm and more like farmyard entrails. Nothing says welcome to my home for Halloween like animal inner-nasty-bits.

  • Christine G October 22, 2012 - 9:31 am Reply

    Also, love the “visions of an emergency room trip without a bra on” – tmi but we’ve all had that horrifying thought, right? ^_~

  • DianneBehenWithers October 22, 2012 - 12:06 pm Reply

    Kinda looks like raw hamburger 😀

  • BobbieJoWilliamsHardy October 24, 2012 - 5:59 am Reply

    Can you blow? I would figure that would work best. Besides its not like your party friends were in the kitchen when ya did it. They’d never know…….

    • IoffendReason October 24, 2012 - 9:54 pm Reply

      BobbieJoWilliamsHardy – LOOOOOL!!!! Sorry, I lost it at “Can you blow?”.

    • KatherynBeerman November 13, 2012 - 6:41 am Reply

      BobbieJoWilliamsHardy She’s married, so I’m guessing she does….wacka wacka wacka

  • Heidimeek October 24, 2012 - 10:39 am Reply

    EWWWW the rolled one looks like roadkill!

  • vimNvigor October 24, 2012 - 12:24 pm Reply

    I don’t know if it’s because my period is literally 4 hours away from making it’s monthly appearance, but your entire jelly worm blog entry kept reminding me of the various stages of menstruation.

  • How do you make money on a blog? | Sonja Foust October 25, 2012 - 8:09 am Reply

    […] I’d love to see it. What else have I been up to lately? What I Wrote I attempted to make Jello Worms. They turned out gross, but not exactly in the way I’d planned. After a weekend of fails, I […]

  • mkcourt13 October 27, 2012 - 4:47 pm Reply

    So sad it didn’t work for you. I made these last year and had great success. I even managed to get the colour of mine to look even more realistic, it was truly gross. http://www.madcourthouse.blogspot.ca/2011/10/happy-halloween-here-have-some-worms.html

    • SherriPate October 27, 2012 - 5:52 pm Reply

      Those look grossly realistic!! I don’t even know if I’d be able to stomach the sight if I got that in my lunchbox as a child! Way to go though!!

  • Cassi October 28, 2012 - 2:52 am Reply

    Just reading it sounds difficult…but it gave me a brilliant idea…straw Jell-O shots! I mean, who doesn’t love Jell-O shots?? So I made a trip to the liquor store, then the grocery store (I can’t keep liquor in my house…it seems to ‘magically disappear’ in the middle of the night!) I started it mixing the water, jello mix, and rum. Instead of putting the mixture in plastic cups, I put it in straws. Before I go on, I would like to let it be known I drank about half the bottle of rum before I the mixture cooled, so I was a little tipsy! With that said…I quickly realized the mixture would not simply stay in the straw just because I wanted it to…then I thought of pixie stixs…not the paper ones, but the ones that come in the plastic neon colored tubes…how does the powder stay in the tube….ITS SEALED! DUH! So I burned the edges of all my straws…really monotonous! Problem solved. After a day in the fridge…it was time to give it a whirl! Some of them I just sucked straight out of the straws and others, tried to squeeze the jello out. I don’t know if it was because of the end be ing closed or what, but it was easier then I thought, but still did not look like the pin…but boy, were they good!

    • Warrior Maiden January 30, 2015 - 6:55 pm Reply

      This is what we did in my student flat, we couldn’t get them out though, so we just served them in the straws. Didn’t go down that well, we ended up eating them for about a week after the party. We enjoyed them.

  • Cassi October 28, 2012 - 3:07 am Reply

    Try it again, but this time burn on tip of the straws closed and pour the mixture into the straw…they are WAY easier to squeeze out

  • BethStokley November 3, 2012 - 9:07 pm Reply

    This kind of reminds me of what raw hamburger meat would look like before they grind it up….what? You haven’t inspected YOUR raw hamburger meat and got grossed out at the long, intestine-like pieces?? Even the original bowl looked nasty, so I’d still call this a win.

  • anitanovak November 11, 2012 - 2:05 am Reply

    LOL  I can’t stop laughing. Awesome!

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  • ThetaSigma October 19, 2013 - 2:39 pm Reply

    Nope, can’t beat my gummy worms. That and Hershey’s Cookies & Cream bars are my two biggest weaknesses (not that cheese, Almond Joys, um, food in general aren’t big weaknesses too!)

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