Molly Yeh & Her Modern Jello Mould
Plus a Q&A with Molly and what to make for Easter!
I’m so excited for today’s email, featuring a Q&A with Molly Yeh, plus a giveaway and her recipe (below!) for Extras subscribers. Enjoy!
5 Favorite Easter Recipes
I have a list of 15 delicious and fun Easter recipes on my website. You can choose your favorite, or jump straight to one of my 5 favorites:
Easter Cupcakes: Made just for the occasion, these are bright, fun and perfect for a party and kids.
Carrot Cake: One of the Easter classics, and my best-ever cake is a delicious showstopper. Be sure to make it this month and join the April Zoë’s Baking Academy challenge! Details here.
Honey Cake With Honey Buttercream: Decorating with flowers gives this cake a springtime feel.
Red Velvet Cake with Basket Weave: Red velvet is a crowd-pleasing classic, and the basket weave makes for an elegant cake.
Pavlova: One of my favorite easier-than-it-looks desserts is light, bright and just right for a spring holiday.
Molly Yeh is taking dessert salads to center stage, and I am here for it. The Jell-O Mold is quintessentially Midwestern, but also harkens back to a more Rococo time. You can imagine ornate moulds of gelatin and aspic on a tablescape at Versailles. No one ever put Grand Forks and Versailles in the same sentence, never, until now. They seem like opposites, and yet, Molly has inspired a movement that will bring them together. The only difference is that Midwesterners tend to use a simpler, less braggadocious jello mold. I went full Marie Antoinette! You do you and pick the vessel that best matches your occasion, just make sure it’s about the same size (see recipe below).
The flavors and colors of this dessert salad are surprising and fully Molly. She always plays with unique combinations of the flavors she grew up with, plus those from the Sweet Farm she now lives on in the Midwest. Adding coconut milk to pomegranate in a jello mold is not something you’d typically find in a church basement, until now. It is bright, creamy, gorgeous, and worthy of a holiday party or just a fun weekend at home with your family. Oh, and as a mom of small kids, she knows what will be fun for them, too. I find all of the recipes in her book are kid friendly, not only will they want to eat them, but also inspire them to help out in the kitchen. WIN!
Molly brings joy to the kitchen and beyond through her Food Network shows, her books (Sweet Farm!, Home is Where the Eggs Are, Molly on the Range, and Short Stack: Yogurt), her social media presence, and her impromptu musical sessions with her dad. I am thrilled she took some time to share her culinary journey with us and she’s also giving away TWO COPIES of her book! Leave a comment below or like this post (heart icon at top of this post) by Sunday, April 13, 2025 at 11:59 p.m. for a chance to win. Winners will be notified next week via Substack message. US addresses only.
The Pomegranate Coconut Gelatin Mold recipe from Sweet Farm! is available below for my Extras members! It is a perfect dessert for your Easter table!
Q&A: Molly Yeh, Food Network host and NYT Bestselling cookbook author
Q: Who or what inspired you to get into food?
My whole family loves food. My mom has always loved cooking and baking, my dad eats everything under the sun as long as it’s not goat cheese, my extended family is always planning the next meal before we’re even done eating the current one, and my older sister was always making potions and concoctions at restaurants when we were kids. She ended up going to culinary school. I went to music school but eventually found myself sneaking out of the practice room early to go on food adventures around the city.
Q: What inspired you to write your latest book, Sweet Farm!?
In music school I discovered that I get the most amount of creative satisfaction out of making sweets (more so than playing the xylophone). So in the kitchen I’ve always considered myself a baker first. And I love seeing the looks on my friends’ faces when I feed them sweets. After marrying a literal sugar farmer, I knew deep down that Sweet Farm!* was a book that needed to be written.
Q: What was the most surprising thing about living on a sugar beet farm?
Everything was new and surprising. I didn’t even know what a sugar beet was until I started dating my husband and I thought that a farm was a place where you could walk barefoot through crops at sunrise wearing a cute sundress and sun hat. I now know how muddy it is. And how big the tractors are. Don’t ever wear a sundress on a tractor.
Q: Tell folks about the concept of a Sweet Farm Salad (!) and why you needed to include them.
Sweet salads are my favorite part about the cuisine in the upper Midwest. I love that you don’t need a vegetable to make a salad and I love all of the variations and adorable names. Delights, fluffs, surprises . . . so great. And at the end of the day, they’re delicious and functional, so I just want everybody to love them.
Q: What's your favorite piece of kitchen equipment and why?
The small offset spatula* because it’s so versatile. If I had to replace a hand with a utensil it would be that one. I use it every day for making pb and j sandwiches for my girls, and also for frosting cakes, dislodging muffins from the muffin tin, buttering toast . . . it makes these tasks so ergonomically satisfying.
Q: What is your favorite bakery?
Breads in New York, Loaf Lounge in Chicago, Valentine in Phoenix, Lodge Bread in LA, Tandem in Maine, Huckleberry in Santa Monica, K’Far in Philly, Bernie’s in East Grand Forks (hah! sorry), Hof Kelsten in Montreal, Zak the Baker in Miami, Rose Bakery in Paris . . . I know I’m forgetting places but these are the top of my mind! And I have so many I want to try too . .. Librae and Hani’s in NY are at the top of my list!
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Exclusive Recipe: Pomegranate Coconut Gelatin Mold
From Molly: A bavarois* meets malabi† meets I-told-you-I-was-bringing-a-salad-to- thepotluck-and-heck- yeah-this-is-what- I-meant-just-be-glad-there’s-not-Mountain-Dew-and-peas-in-this-Jell-O-salad.
* Bavarian cream, heavy on the eggs, super rich and luxurious
† Middle Eastern milk pudding traditionally topped with fruity rose syrup