rainbow gatorade jelly bundt

Last Wednesday I was driving my kiddo to basketball training. He had a bottle of Gatorade in the cupholder, a basketball in his lap, and I couldn’t stop wondering whether Gatorade would jelly.

From there, the obvious next step was to make a seven-layer Gatorade jelly bundt and throw a basketball at it in the name of artvertising.

I dropped him at training, drove directly to Barkly Square and bought every flavour of Gatorade I could find:

Grape
Blue Bolt
Glacier Freeze
Lemon Lime
Orange
Berry
Tropical

I also bought a rainbow basketball from Kmart. The project was gathering momentum.

ENGINEERING THE WOBBLE

The first job was calculating the capacity of the bundt pan, the volume of each layer and how much gelatine would be needed to set the whole thing firmly enough to turn out.

I used a Nordic Ware Large Anniversary bundt tin and five titanium-strength gelatine leaves per 500 ml layer - just a tad more than conventionally recommended for a soft set. Conveniently, my client is McKenzie’s, which meant I had both the gelatine and a strong professional incentive for this to work.

Starting at 7.30 pm, each layer needed about an hour to set before I could add the next, so the process became:

1. Prepare one layer.

2. Refrigerate it.

3. Prepare the next flavour.

4. Let it cool to the right temperature.

5. Pour it very carefully over the previous layer.

6. Repeat until questioning every decision that led here.
   

The seventh and final layer poured at 2.30 am, I collapsed into bed, waking up 4 hours later, excited but acutely aware that I’m now too old to stay up until 2.30am making jelly.

INVERTING 3.5L OF DOUBT

For maximum insurance the jelly remained refrigerated until 2.30pm, minus a short and nerve-wracking drive to the studio. After realising I didn’t grease the tin, hang a minor mental break down, picking myself back up and saying a quick prayer to the gelatine gods, I dipped the outside of the tin in warm-to-hot water for about 10 seconds, then inverted it onto a tray.

It came out cleanly, which I hadn’t planned for emotionally.

Because I’m a Virgo, I also decided this would be the ideal project for trying video for the first time. Naturally, I chose a concept that allowed for exactly one take.

The plan was to throw the rainbow basketball at the jelly and capture a dramatic explosion of fluorescent layers. But physics had other plans and the jelly absorbed the impact, wobbled with alarming structural confidence and remained completely intact (check it out on the ‘gram). It could have been an advertisement for McKenzie’s. The gelatine had done its job a little too well.

It wasn’t the dramatic destruction I’d pictured - the Gatorade jelly had clearly decided to play defence.

A perfect concept for a kids’ sports breakup party, if orange wedges no longer feel competitive enough.

ONE FINAL CONTRIBUTION TO NPD

Each bottle had about 100 ml left over, so naturally we combined all seven into one homemade super flavour. Let’s just say I won’t be doing any new-product-development work for Gatorade anytime soon. It tasted revolting and looked like swamp water. Some ideas are too polarising even for me.