It’s time for another recipe from 1965! Continuing our vintage cooking experiment, this time Rodd chose the recipe from February 14 – Mysterious Pudding.

Very simple recipe! It’s basically a cross between a trifle and a moulded jelly:

Sandwich cake, jelly crystals, bananas. Line a jelly mould with slices of banana, then half fill with alternate layers of cake (sliced thinly) and banana. Fill the mould with the hot jelly, allow to set. Serve with cream or cold boiled custard. A good way of using up stale cake.

Here are the very simple ingredients we started with. We used a storebought sponge cake, a box of Aeroplane jelly (an Aussie classic!) in “Port Wine” flavour, and a bunch of ripe bananas.

We did not, however, have a jelly mould so we made do with a large glass container. Mr. Snook got to work lining it with banana slices.

He also sliced up the sponge into thinner pieces…

…and added a layer above the banana.

It was at this point that I realised each box of jelly only made about 500ml (2 cups) of gelatin. “I don’t think it’s going to be enough!” We decided to instead do two boxes in separate layers FOR EXTRA MYSTERY.

After agreeing that pineapple would be the bottom (top) layer, I mixed it up while he completed the banana and cake layers. Then we carefully poured the liquid jelly over the cake and fruit, letting it soak in.

Then that went into the fridge to firm up a bit…

Once it was starting to firm up, we added the next layer of “Port Wine” jelly. Note: as far as I know, this is not a flavour that Jell-O ever produced, so I had definitely never had it in my life!

Then that went back into the fridge to fully firm up overnight. Hey, that looks pretty mysterious!

But how to get it out of the dish? We started by dipping the container into a sink full of hot water…

…and then when that didn’t work, we ran a knife down the sides. Then we flipped it over and…

SHHHHHLLLLUUUUUURP! It was free.

So. Mysterious.

Rodd started slicing it into pieces, while I used a hand mixer to whip some cream. Hey, that looks pretty cool!

We served it with the whipped cream, as directed.

I really liked it! But Jell-O was always a favourite treat growing up. Rodd felt that the red layer didn’t really add anything, and we’d have been better off leaving it out. We both thought the layers of jelly-soaked cake with banana were way better than they had any right to be.

To modernise this, I’d definitely start by making your own cake. The cake layers were the best, so I wouldn’t bother with any jelly on its own. Rodd also reckons that making your own gelatin – using real fruit juice – would taste nicer than the boxed artificial stuff. We suggest filling the container/mould with the cake layers, and making sure that each layer is fully saturated. You could even do different flavoured jellies for each layer, waiting for each one to set before pouring the next! That would be epic – AND MORE MYSTERIOUS – when you unmoulded it. 😉