In discussing a birthday party treat for my son, who isn't a huge fan of cakes, he asked for a non-cake Creeper of some sort. My wheels turned and turned through brownies and pan cookies, but settled on a Jello Creeper. Then I thought, 'Come on HLJ, you can go a little further than a rectangle of green Jello with eyes and a mouth"...and I realized....Minecraft is all about blocks....and you can make Jello into Jiggler blocks.....so why not craft a Creeper head from individual Jigglers? A cursory Google search yielded me no results that looked like anything I was envisioning.
A from-scratch DIY Creeper head it would be, then.
First, I had to figure colors. After looking at Image results for Creepers, I settled on a few shades of green, some clear, dark grey, and black as the colors I would need.
- Green, that's easy: Lime Jello (though I'd change that up later).
- Clear: No problem - I'd buy the clearest juice I could find, and use plain unflavored gelatin.
- Grey: Also pretty easy, just use a small amount of black food coloring in a batch of the clear juice.
- Black: I didn't want to have to put a ton of black food coloring into clear juice, so I decided to get a decent flavor Jello that would be easiest (in my mind) to convert to black...grape! That nice medium purple color converted to black with just a little black food coloring, quite nicely. I imagine black cherry flavor would work pretty well, too.
THEN, I needed to plot this out - there was no way I was going to wing it when I assembled this, too many opportunities to mess it up. I settled on an 8x8 head, and started mapping out and calculating, using Excel to set up the colors and then translate that into a letter code, which I printed out and had in front of me when I built it.
What I ended up with was:
Grey: 8 blocks
Black: 10 blocks
Clear: 8 blocks
Green: 38 blocks
My initial spreadsheet effort, when I thought about shades and placement:
I later realized that the most important part was making sure the blacks and greys were in the right places, and the greens and clears could be more random....so my finished product does not totally reflect the above chart.
The next consideration was to figure out what container to use. I had mini loaf pans that worked perfectly. Each pan held one small box's worth of Jello and made 8 blocks when cut up. If you don't have mini loaf pans, you need to use pretty small containers....small enough to make a single box's worth of jello (3 oz box) that will still be around 1 to 1-1/2 inches high. I got my mini loaf pans years ago, a set of 4 for about $10 and they're been well worth the money for various applications. A decent set will run you $10-20 these days.
When all was said and done, I made 1 batch of grey, 2 batches of black, 1 batch of clear, and 5 batches of green. I'd use my 4 mini loaf pans, set them for about an hour, then dunk for about 10 seconds in hot water, unmold and store the bricks in a container together while I made the next set of 4....then I just had one batch to make the third go 'round.
The total elapsed time for this was about 5 hours start to finish, BUT that was waiting an hour each time for the Jello to set because I only had 4 pans, and I was doing this while also doing other prjoects. Each step only took 5-10 minutes at a go, and assembling it took about 20 minutes.
On to making! This kind of morphed along the way as I had to do some minor on-the-fly calculations and runs back out to the store, to partition the Jiggler and Knox Blox recipes that were written for 4 envelopes/packets at a time, but I'll spare you that whole process and just get to the directions, as I finally did it.
For a printable PDF, click here
INGREDIENTS:
1 64 oz bottle of White Cranberry Juice, or the most colorless juice you can find
1 box Knox unflavored gelatine
1 bottle black food coloring
2 3-oz boxes Grape Jello
2 3-oz boxes Melon Fusion Jello
2 3-oz boxes Lime Jello (or 4 of these if you can't find the melon kind)
green food coloring
lots of water
PREPARE THE GELS:
For each 3 oz box of Jello, use 2/3 cup of boiling water. I used a microwave safe measuring cup, heated the water for 1:30 and just mixed in and poured from it. Mix it slowly but thoroughly to avoid bubbles/foam as you want these blocks as clean as possible.
-For the green Jello:
1. Prepare one melon one as is.
2. Add a couple drops of green food coloring to the other melon one.
3. Prepare one lime one as is.
4. Add a couple drops of green to another lime one. If you're using all limes and no melons, just try to vary the colors of the greens a bit.
5. (The fifth green batch is actually made with clear juice, see below)
-For the black Jello:
Make the grape Jello, and add 5-ish drops of black food coloring.
-For the clear Knox:
Put 1/4 cup cold juice in a bowl big enough to hold 2 cups of liquid (to allow head space for stirring). Sprinkle 1 packet of Knox over it. While that gels, heat 1/2 c of juice to boiling (I used a microwave safe measuring cup and heated for 1:30). Stir hot juice into cold juice and mix slowly but well until the gel dissolves, about 2 minutes.
-For the grey Knox:
Same as the clear Knox, but after the gel is mixed in, add 2 drops of black food coloring and mix well. Add 1-3 drops more, depending on the color grey you desire. I went for a pretty charcoal-y grey, and used about 4 drops for one batch of liquid.
-For one set of very pale green Knox (the 5th batch of green):
Make clear Knox, and add 2 drops of green food coloring. This one you want to leave pale, to contrast the darker ones but not quite be clear.
ASSEMBLY:
With the mini loaf pan sizing, cutting was a breeze, no measurement necessary. I cut each brick in half lengthwise, then cut each strip into four so I had 8 blocks, a little over an inch square. I was not super into precision. Using the grid was really helpful and made it go very quickly...I think it took longer to cut the bricks into blocks than it did to assemble it. I started with the inner 4 bricks, and then worked outward. I made sure to not group similarly colored blocks in more than about 3 touching each other, just to give it the pixilated appearance.
The grid -
G G G G C G G G
G G C G G G G G
G Gy Gy G G Gy Gy C
G Gy B C G B Gy G
C G G G G G G G
G G Gy B B Gy G C
C G B B B B G G
G G B C G B G G
Some in-progress shots:
FINISHED PRODUCT:
The Minecraft-themed treat spread: Creeper, Gold (Rolos), Cookies, TNT (Twizzlers), and Sand Blocks (Rice Krispie Treats)
THOUGHTS:
I might just use the white cranberry juice for all the greens, and just add 1-2 more drops for each batch so I definitely had 5 different colors. Sure I'd have to buy a second box of Knox, but I wouldn't have half a bottle of white cranberry juice left to drink.
This was a BIG HIT with my kiddo (11 yrs old), his buddies (10 yrs old), and his sister (8 yrs old), and it couldn't have been easier to slap a couple small candles in it, sing to him, and then have them all just pull blocks off and eat them. Almost like pull apart bread, minus the bread - or a cupcake-cake, minus the cake!
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