Jell-O shots are in. I would say that they’re back, but that would imply they’ve had a moment like this in the past, and I hardly think the clichés of swirling your dirty finger around a plastic shot glass in a frat basement to pry loose the delicious notes of Kool Aid and grain alcohol bear any resemblance to what Jena Derman and Jack Schramm are doing at Solid Wiggles.
The duo has been churning out high-end luxury alcoholic and NA jellies since 2020, growing their operation from a one-off pop-up to a full-fledged catering business and wholesale operation with hot-spot bar and restaurant clients like Tatiana, Milady’s, and Champer’s Social Club; and, as of last week, a cookbook.
Back in 2012, Schramm interned under Derman at Milk Bar through the NYU food studies program, and the two hit it off (remember paid internships?). In the following years, Derman, a pastry chef, grew the bakery’s cookie and ice cream business, while Schramm went on to become a mixologist at Booker and Dax, or, as he tells it, “to learn centrifuges and liquid nitrogen.”
Around 2018, Derman began experimenting on her own time with large-format jelly cakes for weddings and openings. So when Schramm did a pop-up at Wildaire in September 2020, he reached out for help developing a lemon gin cucumber cocktail jelly. When they sold out immediately, the duo realized they were onto something special. “We knew we had an amazing connection and that the product was really good…we weren’t planning to reinvent the Jell-O shot,” Derman says. “It was a natural evolution that got us here.”
Gelatin: A New Aesthetic Medium
Solid Wiggles is riding a wave (perhaps of their own making) right now. “Sometimes in pastry and bartending, we have trends where everything is kind of over the top and ugly, or there’s an anti-aesthetic,” Derman says. “But right now we’re currently in a strong aesthetic period where everything is beautiful again.” Solid Wiggles’ jellies are art unto themselves, from the rainbow ombre grid patterns of their spicy passion fruit margarita jelly and to the neon pink and green of their Strawberry daiquiri jelly and the electric chartreuse tone of their midori sour. Colorful stripes and swirls bend impossibly through the jiggling cubes, while spheres of color, leaves, and cherries are impossibly suspended.
The jellies are so visually compelling that it’s hard to believe it’s the flavors that usually guide the creation process. “Usually this delicious jelly flavor combination, what design and what colors make sense inside of this canvas,” Schramm says of the creative process, though he clarifies, “we’re always working in both directions. Sometimes we have a design we want to use, and we ask ‘what’s the right drink for this?’”
In the case of their recent spicy mango mezcal margarita, the duo started with the flavor profile of the cocktail they were mimicking. “We have the clear base that’s…clarified citrus and base spirit, then the bottom layer where we pour after we’ve done all the injecting—that’s where the accent flavors go in,” Schramm explains. “In the case of the spicy mango, it’s a deep orange because of mango juice and chili d’arbol, so that locks us into the deep orange colorway.”
On the Up and Up
Jell-O came to them organically, but Derman and Schramm seem to be part of a larger jelly trend. When they started selling Jell-O shots out of a window in NYC in 2020, across the country, Lexi Park was peddling intricate jelly cakes in beautiful floral patterns at a Nunchi pop-up in a parking lot in Los Angeles. Since then, the trend has only leveled up, and so has Solid Wiggles.
As Tatiana started serving Solid Wiggles jellies to customers who had waited 30 days for their reservation, Vandell’s regulars were ordering off-menu Jell-o shots served in thin Japanese glassware. Today, at the chicest events–from Herman Miller product launches to Emmy’s afterparties–chances are you’ll find Solid Wiggles’s bite-size art (for the former, bite sized jellies in a wood grain pattern and for the latter, ocean-toned floral Blue Hawaii jellies) passed around on a tray. Solid Wiggles’ business extends beyond corporate purveyors with direct-to-consumer boxes available for pick up from their Brooklyn-based warehouse and, soon, nation-wide shipping. Clearly, they’re at the forefront of a trend, and one that’s transcended a handful of posts on social media.
Derman posits that they got off the ground because of the pandemic-era context in which they launched. “We were selling them in units of six, so you could come pick them up and enjoy them in the park with a friend,” she says. “There was such a depression for joy. Restaurants were still super closed…[people] were starved for everything.”
She acknowledges that their continued success is intertwined with “nostalgia that people have for Jell-O shots as a child or in college.” Derman also points to a larger trend within catering and events of “small composed bites.” Who would have thought that Jell-O shots would take hold culturally because of a desire for beauty, community, and thoughtful flavor composition?
Solid Wiggles: The “Cookbook”
Derman and Schramm’s new cookbook, Solid Wiggles: Recipes and Techniques for Phenomenal Jelly Shots and Cakes, which came out from Ten Speed Press on June 23, aims to make their jellies more accessible to the home cook. Unless your kitchen is equipped with a centrifuge and stocked with clarification enzymes, you’re probably not going to turn out the kind of intricate designs and nuanced flavors that Solid Wiggles offers to their customers. The duo is aware of those limitations, so they intentionally structured the book in two parts: Party Animal for beginners, which has quick recipes that produce a jelly only slightly more elevated than the offerings at your gimmick-oriented local dive; and Party PRO, for more advanced, layered recipes that step up the design.
Schramm explains that they made an effort to include recipes that can be made in an afternoon without any advanced artistic technique. “We wanted to put accessibility at the forefront and put some easy recipes that are still delicious at the top,” he says. “I know people are going to make the Party Animal recipes for their friends and families and it’s going to be the most delicious jelly creation any of them have ever had.”
For the more ambitious, Solid Wiggles includes options for a “three-day art project” (you’ll have to buy the book to find out more.) But don’t get ahead of yourself. The most important thing for a home cook attempting to undertake their jellies, Schramm emphasizes, is: “don’t try to make something exceedingly delicious with powdered gelatin. Just spring for the sheets and learn how to bloom them. Your life is going to be so much better and everything is going to be so much more delicious.”
“Solid Wiggles” Copyright © 2026 by Jena Derman and Jack Schramm. Photographs copyright © 2026 by Hugo Yu. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.”
