Today, we want to show you how to use butterfly pea flowers to make a pretty and delicious blue jelly. It’s a quick and easy dessert you can make ahead of time and serve your guests with some fancy toppings. We’re sure everyone will love it!
All you need are three simple ingredients: butterfly pea flowers, a sweetener, and a gelling agent, like agar or gelatine powder. That’s it!
The recipe is based on the basic jelly (or jello) dessert: sweetened and flavoured water jellified with gelatine.
We used butterfly pea flowers to make blue tea (also called blue pea tea) and sweetened it with sugar-free erythritol. Then, we cooked it with agar powder, and finally, we let the blue jelly set in the fridge in moulds.
Let’s quickly take a look at these three ingredients.
Erythritol is a natural sweetener that tastes like sugar but has no calories — great for sugar-free desserts. But, if you prefer, you can swap erythritol with sugar in 1:1 ratio.
Agar powder is a vegan alternative to gelatine that gets activated when you cook it and sets in the fridge when it cools down. If you want to use agar flakes or vegan gelatine, check our tips in the recipe below.
Butterfly pea flowers are beautiful blue flowers found in Southeast Asia.
It’s a Thai tradition to use butterfly pea flowers to make blue tea. But these wonderful flowers are widely used in many other recipes across Southeast Asia like drinks, sweets, desserts, and more.
When you steep butterfly pea flowers in hot water or milk, they release their deep blue pigments, giving a wonderful blue hue to your dishes. They taste earthy, grassy, and delicately floral — similar to matcha but sweeter.
You can find dried butterfly pea flowers at your local Asian food store or online. You can also buy blue pea flower powder, sometimes called “blue matcha”. But no matter what you can find, we’ll show you to prepare the blue jelly with dried or powdered flowers!
Once ready, flip the blue pea jelly on serving plates and garnish it as you like it the most or follow our toppings ideas below. It’s a light and fresh dessert that tastes sweet and floral and looks so pretty!
And if you’re wondering what else you could make with butterfly pea flowers, check out this spongy blue cake, blue pea cheesecake, and butterfly pea bubble tea. You’ll love them!
