Trust me, it looked better last night. Sort of like that old joke, “I went home at two with a ten, and woke up at ten with a two.” The abomination pictured above is one of a few tiki jello shots I made during service as an experiment. Yes, I know, it looks like it was excreted from the rectangular rectum by some reprobate Cthulhu hellspawn straight outta Pandemonium. It also tasted really weird but in a good, strong, punch you in the teeth sorta way. Maybe blackstrap rum wasn’t the way to go, maybe it all should have been diluted a bit. Lots of maybes. The intention here (the world was built on good intentions, is that how the old saw goes?) was to emulate a classic Corn ‘n’ Oil but with coconut.

The little layers are clumsy but intentional and I think this would actually look nice if I didn’t hack and pry it out of a square silicon mold with a butter knife. An insertion into some warm water would do the trick quite nicely. Yeah, it’s probably just something to hand out to regulars for a laugh and not a solid menu item.

There are some people out there that do really nice jello shots. These guys, Solid Wiggles, out of New York. I have no idea how they make them look so good. They call them “jelly cakes” which I assume are modeled after the jelly cakes originally from Mexico (originally from Mexico?). I don’t know. After a lazy google search I found an article in Better Homes and Gardens of all places. Scroll down a bit as the first picture looks terrifying. Yeah, to make these fun just add booze and more gelatin.

What is gelatin exactly? Well my friends, it’s hydrolyzed collagen. Yeah, it’s made from all the leftover stuff, you know, the bones, skin, teeth, cartilage, hooves, of animals. Not something you’d want to serve at a big vegan, vegetarian, or pescatarian bash (doesn’t sound like a lot of fun anyway). But hey, one big benefit of a jello shot is it can help your skin glow while you’re chewing down your booze in some seedy dive or a party where you’re definitely too old to be.

I’m pretty sure my first jello shot was at a party in high school. They were served in the little, layered paper cups like the ones I once used at the dentist or if you remember, the way they hand out medications in movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

In case you’re wondering, it’s called a paper portion, or souffle cup. You can buy 5000 of the 2oz. versions here for $74.99. Pretty good deal. That’s $.014998 apiece. How can something be that cheap? I’ll never understand. It means they produce these babies for even cheaper and somehow turn a profit. There’s a machine out there just spitting these out…Thousands upon thousands of little perforated paper cups and of all different sizes as well!

I feel like jello shot is a bit of a misnomer. Jello refers to a product whereas the jello shot itself may never have to use jello packets in its construction. Hence all the other names for them–jelly cakes, etc. We should call them something else at Rustic, Gelled Booze, or Cocktail Wigglies, or Gelatin Cocktails, hmm, I don’t know anymore. I’m in the process of moving and my brain is melted. Gelatinized Shots? Pig hoof, snout, and skin cocktail anyone? Yeah, it’s a bit like Xerox or Kleenex. It doesn’t matter if you buy the cheap Vons version, it’ll still be called by the brand name. I wonder if this will happen in the future when we have machines and cyborgs doing everything for us? Will there be cheaper cleaning robots that glitch out as we still call them by the expensive brand name? Will they talk back to us and say, “Hey asshole, I’m not an iBot, I’m a Krogerbot.”