Summer is fast approaching so why not take on a new dessert recipe that is sure to please everyone and even boost their energy. If you’re currently looking for a recipe that can help quench the summer heat, then this coffee jelly recipe is just the perfect thing to learn.

It’s not a Filipino recipe per se, as coffee jelly is an extremely popular thing in Japan years before it became a popular dessert in the Philippines, but it’s incredibly easy to make and uses cheap ingredients that are readily available for Filipinos.

Despite its popularity in Japan–coffee jelly is a common sight in many restaurants and cafes in Japan, coffee jelly is originally a British recipe. The earliest known coffee jelly recipe was published in a cookbook in England as early as 1817.

The recipe calls for the more traditional and tedious way to create jelly: boiling animal calves. When boiled for a long period of time, collagen from the animal hooves can be collected and converted into jelly. The jelly is then mixed with coffee and is sometimes added with more collagen products as clarifiers to create some of the first coffee jelly recipes.

Over the years, creating coffee jelly became an easier affair with the development and mass production of packaged gelatin. There’s no more need for tedious boiling of animal calves to produce jelly. The recipes then evolved to dissolve the gelatin into hot coffee and be molded.

Outside of the British Isles, coffee jelly also became hugely popular on the east coast of the United States. Coffee shops and restaurants in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and other New England states commonly display coffee jelly desserts on their menus. It’s an easy way to not let leftover coffee from the day before not go to waste. A restaurant named Durgin-Park in Boston has been offering coffee jelly to its customers since its establishment in 1827.

Coffee Jelly only reached Japan during the Taisho Period (1912-1926). The Japanese developed their own version of coffee jelly by using a jelly substance called agar (they call this katen in Japan) which came from algae and mixed it with sweetened coffee.

What I’m not sure about is if this the development of this version of coffee jelly is inspired by the recipes from the west or if it’s an original idea by the Japanese that just so happens to have an already existing version on the other side of the world.

What do you think? There’s no info about this that I can find online but I’m leaning on the creation of coffee jelly in Japan is due to the ongoing globalization at that time. Japan was also starting to develop an extremely popular coffee culture at that time and its popularity isn’t fading anytime soon to this day.

Coffee jelly in Japan is normally cut into cubes and served in a variety of ways. Sometimes, these coffee-flavored cubes are added into milkshakes, or as garnish on ice cream sundaes. More commonly, coffee jelly is added to a cup of hot or iced coffee.

In the Philippines, the coffee jelly dessert as we know it is becoming a more and more common sight in fiestas as desserts or poured with condensed milk or cream. There are also plenty of coffee jelly items found in establishments like bubble tea shops.

But in my perspective, the best kind of coffee jelly is the kind that’s consumed at home. And with this homemade coffee jelly recipe that we’re sharing with you today, anyone can do it using cheap and minimal ingredients. It’s cheap, tasty, and very easy to make. What more can you want in a dessert?

Try this recipe and you’ll surely go back and recreate this again and again in your kitchen. All of the ingredients used for this tasty coffee jelly recipe as well as the cooking instructions can be seen down below. We also have a fun video made for a live version on how to make this delicious coffee jelly recipe. Enjoy!

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