:( Yes, sadness I know. However, being the creative person I try to be I had two thoughts as soon and I got over the fact that my fruit snacks did not turn out. My first thought came to me as I was slicing the frozen fruit mixture (I'd popped the fruit mix into the freezer hoping that it would help them set up the way that I'd wanted them) I thought they would work perfectly as mixers for smoothies! Freeze them, slice them, then bag them and throw them in the freezer (takes up less space) and voila! Just throw the milk of your choice (I've been diggin the coconut milk by Silk) with a banana into a blender and one or two of the fruit blocks and you've got something quick and easy to take on the go with you for the morning. Not my most creative idea, but I think I was still dwelling.
My second thought struck me early yesterday morning. My son and I are early risers, my husband is up way before dawn and leaves for work. My son and I wake up in his process to get out the door. Its our special time together. We eat breakfast, read some books, color, work on letters and numbers, and sometimes we watch a movie while I drink my coffee. Well, as I was waiting on the skillet to heat up to cook our eggs I was standing there staring at the should be fruit snacks and then it dawned on me. "Duh Jess! Make fruit leather with it!" It also was a super easy thing to make, just simply follow my recipe from here and set your oven temp as low as it can go. That can fall anywhere between 140*F and 170*F. I lined my shallowest baking sheet with saran wrap (I know, that sounds weird because its going in the oven, but trust me!) and spread the fruit mix as evenly as I could in the baking sheet. That part is pretty crucial. If the mix is not spread evenly then you are going to have problems with the dehydration. And then the drying process commenced. This is what it'll look like at this step:
Now be prepared.... This occupied my oven all. day. long. I put it in at 0700, and took it out at 1900 (7 pm for anyone who's not familiar with military time). But let me tell you it was sooo worth it. It peeled from the saran wrap easy (and left no clean up! Woot!) and I just used a pizza slicer to cut it up into strips. These are the little gems, and I will be doing this again! (And a side note, they taste even better after sitting in a plastic Ziploc bag overnight. Gives it back a little moisture!) In fact, you could probably eliminate the 1/4 cup of water or juice that was included in the fruit snack recipe to speed up the dehydration process.
So this ends my fruit-snacks-turned-fruit-leather creation extravaganza. For the time being... I'm still on a mission to find a way to recreate fruit snacks made at home in a more holistic, clean eating way! Stay tuned for tonight's dinner (which was DEVOURED) and tomorrow mornings breakfast!
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