Marty's Layered Purple & White Grape Jelly

There is a big women's event coming up at our church in April, the 10th Annual Ladies Gala.

They allow certain vendors to sell items, and I signed up to sell jellies and jams. I have been thinking of ideas for jellies and jams that are different, unique and/or have eye-appeal. This past week I came up with the idea for layered jelly. Just to see if there was actually someone else that had done it before, I surfed the net and found nothing. Someone somewhere has probably done this before, but I didn't see any web postings.

This ended up being fairly simple. Each of the layers have the same ingredients (except for the color of the grape juice.) Also, I worked with grape juice instead of grapes and that is a HUGE time saver.

I am going to make an assumption here that anyone trying to do this has at least SOME experience in jelly/jam making. It will save me the time of typing out each and every little instruction! My yield for this was 10 half-pint jars.

Ingredients for each layer:
3 cups of grape juice (4 cups for the white jelly and 4 cups for the purple jelly)
4 cups of sugar
1 packet of pectin powder
1/2 teaspoon of butter (optional, reduces foaming)
Also get a clean, sterilized cloth ready by boiling it in water, I will talk about why you do that later.

Add the 4 cups of juice of the color you want on the bottom of the jar, the pectin and butter to a large pot. You will get splattered with very hot drops of jelly if you use a small pot! Stirring constantly on high heat, bring the juice up to a very hard boil. Then add all of the sugar at once, keeping the heat on high, and constantly stirring.

Bring again to a FULL ROLLING BOIL, a boil that does not go away when stirred. Most jelly recipes will tell you to boil for exactly one minute at this point. I needed to insure that this jelly set right, and set firmly. You need to get it to the point where the jelly sheets, or at least drips a lot slower than normal from the spatula or spoon. So at the one-minute mark I started dripping juice from the spatula, until the drips slowed down quite a bit and started elongating before they fell off the spatula. This ended up being two minutes of the second boil.

Next quickly pour the jelly into the jars and bring it up to the HALFWAY mark only. You will NOT place the lids and rings on the jars yet, you need to make another layer.

Some of the jelly has probably run down the sides of the inside of the jars. You want to remove this as well as possible, so there there will be a clean, distinct line between the layers in the jars.
Use a corner of the sterilized cloth that you prepared to wipe any of this jelly from the sides of the jar.

Cover the jars with small pieces of plastic wrap, this will prevent 'the ickies' from getting in the jars while they set.

Wait until the jelly has set firmly before starting the next layer. After an hour I checked mine and they were fairly firm. It might be longer or shorter for you, depending on that batch of jam.

Now remove the plastic wrap and prepare a second batch of jelly, using the other color of grape juice. At this point you want to heat your lids too, since you will be sealing them after this layer.

When all of the jars are filled with the second layer, leaving 1/4 inch of headspace, place the lids and rings on the jars. Finally, process in a boiling water-bath canner for 10 minutes.

These look really nice, I hope they sell well. My next batch is going to take the visual-appeal one step further. The next batch will be a layer of apple jelly but with a maraschino cherry or two added, with a layer of white-grape jelly also with a maraschino cherry or two. At least it sounds good in my head, we will see when I do it in the next few days.

Just to show that the jelly really did set, and the colors didn't just settle, here is a jar turned on its side.