These Are Not the Jello Shots You Had in College

When a mixologist and pastry chef team up…

The Deligram shines a spotlight on the many incredible food artisans in New York City. In our last feature, we went to Queens to visit Mendulcina’s Mirta Rinaldi, who makes Alfajores with her daughter out of her home. This week, we’re doing something a bit more spirited, chatting with pastry chef Jena Derman and master mixologist Jack Schramm, the masterminds behind Brooklyn-based Jelly cake brand Solid Wiggles.

The Product: Artful, flavorful masterpieces that put the jello shots of your college years to shame. 

How to Buy: If you’re in New York City, order for delivery or pickup on solidwiggles.com. If not, order on goldbelly.com.

Price: $3 per shot (with a 15 shot minimum), or $85 for a 6” cake.

Jack: Jena and I met when I was in college at NYU for food studies. Jena was the culinary director at Milk Bar and I was interning for her in the Milk Bar commissary. I was not long for the coffee and pastry business – I soon moved across the street and started working at Booker & Dax. From my first shift, I was treating the lime juice with enzymes and spinning it in a centrifuge. I really jumped into the deep end of the crazy high tech bar scene and never left. In 2020, I was the head bartender at Existing Conditions. I was starting to take on some consulting clients and doing some private parties, but I had some space for another project. 

Jena: I’d been playing around with the jello medium for a few years, and was really at a standstill in terms of how to make clear liquids more delicious. I reached out to Jack because of his knowledge in the bar space, and also specifically in the techniques he’d been using to make liquids clear.

Jack: Jena reached out and asked me to come to her apartment. She wanted to make jello with the centrifuge. I tasted the product and was like, “oh my god, we have to put alcohol in this.”

Jena: Jack had an outdoor event early on in COVID. We decided to put some jello on the menu, and because everything was closed and there wasn’t a lot going on we sold out, had a huge turnout and got a bunch of press. Then we went into Halloween, Christmas – we just kept rolling. We’re super fortunate to have found each other when we did. We didn’t intend to have a jello business or jello company. But now we’re starting year four and it’s full time for both of us. We’re just fortunate to have the opportunity to grow – that happened organically. 

We have two formats: we do six-inch cakes, and we make jello shots. They always have the same ratio: clear jello with a spirit and then what we call the background color, which has all the secondary highlight notes of the drink. We knew that would allow us to play around with more nuance. When you think of jello shots from college, maybe it would be one spirit. What we’re able to do is place different things in different parts so it has a similar blooming experience as a cocktail, like a front, middle, back experience as you’re tasting it.

Jack: All our recipes start with clarified and sometimes acid adjusted orange juice, lemon juice or grapefruit juice. It’s the blank canvas that allows everything else to really pop. We just put penicillin on the menu. It has scotch and lemon as the primary flavors and then the ginger and honey are behind it. So in the first bite you get the bright acidity from the lemon and then you get the ginger and honey. My favorite spirits to work with in cocktails are so different from the ones that excite me in the jello space. We’ve had a lot of fun with red bitters, that flavor profile. We have one of our shots, the Dreamboat, where we’re taking fresh orange juice and clarifying it, then adding citric and malic acid so it has the same acidity as lime juice. It’s just a simple, essential, two ingredient flavor profile but really accents both in a way that is really beautiful. What’s exciting about the design is that we’re essentially painting into a 3D space, and the brush is basically a syringe tip. 

Jack: It’s already been a dream, it’s been wonderful in basically every way. We’re learning together every week in a way that’s ours – I really don’t want to be doing anything else. We’re also used to pastry and bar working hours that are notorious for being the most cursed possible times to be at work, and now we live like people [laughs]. I’ve replaced the tactical sensation of making drinks with injecting gelatin, doing something with my hands that I need to feel complete as a human. 

Jena: Last year we introduced our wholesale B2B selling to other bars and restaurants in the city. We’d love to continue expanding on that part of our business, both here in New York and nationally. Adding wholesale has helped us with a little more consistency in regards to order volume, the bars and restaurants re-up every two weeks so it’s consistent, and gets to more people. That’s been really cool to watch so hopefully continuing to grow that. And, also – now that we’re in a growth period and have our systems really down we’d love to take the show on the road a little more, have fun with what we’re doing. 

Jack: The response is overwhelmingly positive, we’re really excited about it. It speaks to the fact that we focus as hard on making them delicious as we do on making them beautiful, they’re two sides of the same coin that are equally valuable and important. We wouldn’t care about one side without the other, so getting that validation is great.

Favorite place to have a cocktail?