Recipes
Homemade Halloween Gummy Worms
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These are our homemade gummy bears in a different mould, and that is the entire difference.
It turns out the shape does most of the work. The same three ingredients that make a perfectly pleasant gummy bear become genuinely unsettling in worm form, especially in the sort of colours that do not occur in nature.
The recipe is short enough to be suspicious: fruit juice, gelatin, something sweet. No corn syrup, no thermometer, nothing you cannot pronounce. It sets in the fridge in an hour or two.
The only piece of kit that matters is the mould. Silicone worm moulds release cleanly where rigid plastic ones tear the worms in half, which is a specific and infuriating way to lose a batch. A dropper or squeeze bottle is the other one worth having, because worm cavities are long and narrow and pouring from a saucepan mostly ends up on the counter.
Two things go wrong, and both are avoidable. Skipping the skim leaves foam in the mixture and cloudy worms. Letting the pan boil breaks the gelatin down and they never fully set - you get something closer to jam.
If you want these for a party, they scale straight up. Double the batch and fill two moulds at once, because the mixture sets faster than you will fill a single tray.
Shape really is most of it
We were not exaggerating about the mould doing the work. Here is the same principle in shop-bought form.
Nobody would look twice at these as ordinary gummy sweets. The novelty is doing all the lifting, which is exactly the trick you are borrowing when you pour the same recipe into a worm mould instead of a bear one.
Homemade Halloween Gummy Worms
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup fruit juice, any flavour - berry and orange both look right for Halloween
- 3 tablespoons unflavoured gelatin powder
- 2 tbsp honey or maple syrup, adjust to taste
- Juice of 1/2 lemon, optional, for brightness
- Gel food colouring, if you want them lurid
Instructions
- In a small saucepan, sprinkle the gelatin over the fruit juice and lemon juice. Let it bloom - sit and thicken - for 5 minutes.
- Add the honey and warm over low heat, stirring gently until the gelatin fully dissolves. Do not let it boil.
- Remove from heat and skim off any foam. Skipping this is why homemade gummies come out cloudy.
- Stir in gel colouring now if you are using it.
- Pour into worm moulds. A dropper or a squeeze bottle beats pouring from the pan - worm cavities are long and thin and the mixture sets fast.
- Refrigerate 1 to 2 hours until firm, then pop them out.
Notes
- Work quickly once it comes off the heat. The mixture starts setting in the pan and gets difficult to pour within about ten minutes.
- For two-tone worms, fill each cavity halfway with one colour, let it set 15 minutes, then top up with the second.
- Keeps about a week in the fridge in an airtight container.