Maxine

My favorite story with Max is the time she convinced a stranger that she remembered him from high school and he subsequently invited us to his bottle service table. My second favorite is the time she talked our way into a limo ride across Madison. What was that limo supposed to be doing? I have no idea. People like me need people like her - otherwise my entire life would be average and boring. Max identifies as "White?" I met her via Jules and then it took a few more months for our schedules to align. So thankful they finally did because who else was going to leave me with Gushers to turn into a dumpling?

So Max's 'dumpling' was actually mochi ice cream. Carb wrapped filling - it counts!

I started by buying a variety box of Gushers, of course. And sorted and soaked them overnight to dissolve/leach flavor and color. We called it a study in color theory.

It worked somewhat okay. It might have worked better with hot water as if steeping a Gusters tea, but my initial thought was that I didn't want to cook it and risk losing the flavorings. Make sure to use as much water as the mochi wrapper calls for (3/4c) plus a little extra. This Gushers tea will be the liquid portion of the mochi dough. Expect to add more [neon] food coloring for maximum Gushers-like vibrancy though.

We made a dozen or so of these little buds following Just One Cookbook's instructions. Have you ever been stressed while folding slowly melting ice cream into mochi wrappers? It's stressful.

The filling was ice cream, as I mentioned. Specifically strawberry ice cream. My initial plan was to get vanilla ice cream and mix in chopped up strawberry gushers pieces.. and then Jules was like "how about we get strawberry ice cream?" because she's a problem solver. We attempted to stuff half a Gusher in each mochi ice cream round anyways, which inevitably led to many more struggles in the folding process. Also after setting in the freezer, the Gushers piece was unsurprisingly quite hard.

By the way, if we get ice cream, Lula also gets pup ice cream.

The main thing I learned actually was that mochi dough can be rolled and cut and rerolled much like wheat dough, which was kind of exciting to me. Here I was just assuming mochi dough cannot be controlled restrained or contained. I remember trying to make mochi ice cream in our college dorms once, where we awkwardly tried to stuff spoonfuls of ice cream in blobs of the still kinda hot mochi dough.

Anyways, we made some blue blueberry grape guys and some green kiwi lime guys. And then we made some blue and green marbled guys. Like earthly Gushers mochi ice creams.

Gushers are only a year older than me, which is truly a fun fact. Apparently at one point, they were the subject of a lawsuit - consumers claimed the packaging art and calling them "fruit snacks" mislead people to believe Gushers were healthy. I'm laughing right now. If you've ever had or seen or held a squishy little Gusher ... or looked at the packaging art... I'm not sure what part makes it seem healthy.

This whimsical "request" by Max also came with a big question of what heritage is. Admittedly I didn't know how to ask this question either - heritage? identity? ethnicity? origin story? birthplace of great great great grandmother? please submit your 23andme results?

And then how do you connect that to food patterns? I'd have to also ask about location, class, decade of childhood, occupation of parents, etc, and better people than me study things like this. We had a conversation about all of this that went nowhere with no solutions, but in the meantime I'm content with dreaming up dumplings from friends' childhood places.

Things I would do differently: work on fold technique, science up some sort of juicy center to wrap in the ice cream that would still be juicy when you bit into it cold, dissolve gushers in hot water.

Max's complete list:

gushers