For everyone celebrating the lunar new year, here’s wishing you a year of abundant grace, love, wisdom and growth.

The eve of Chinese New Year is when we have reunion dinners with our families and I decided to contribute some agar agar and konnyaku jelly for dessert. (This is after my siblings pretty much vetoed a lot of food suggestions I offered to bring for the meal – as it turns out, no one ever says no to dessert!)

My mum had a koi fish jelly mould and so I decided to try my hand at making these jelly desserts in the shape of koi fish. I ended up going to get smaller moulds too just for fun!

It was a bit scary as I was making jelly for the first time ever and half kicked myself for deciding to take on a more ambitious project instead of making regular agar agar jelly in a container with no additional colours.

Thankfully it all worked out… Phew!

This was the large koi jelly:

But I really loved the smaller ones:

The light shining through the koi jellies from my kitchen window made it look even better…

But it also backfired because my family ended up eating all the konnyaku jellies instead because they didn’t want to cut up the big fish. At another family dinner, the small fish were also left on the plate but at the end I managed to convince people to eat them instead! (Note to self: perhaps make a ton in the future so people won’t feel bad eating it or just make regular looking dessert…)

For those who’d like instructions on how to make this, here’s a good resource and I love how her koi jelly turned out (especially with the greens added in!)

That’s it for this week’s episode of trying to scratch my itch. I realise it’s now starting to translate to decorating food instead of craft alone since I have excuses to make them for potluck meals and birthdays. Killing two birds with one stone? I think so ;)

In the meantime, I hope you have a great break and time with family everyone! xx