Jelly babies are a type of soft confectionery that are shaped as babies in a variety of colours. Jelly babies were launched by Bassett's in 1918 in Sheffield as "Peace Babies" to mark the end of World War I. Production was suspended during World War II due to wartime shortages. In 1953 the product was relaunched as "Jelly Babies". In March 1989 Bassett's were taken over by Cadbury-Schweppes.
Each Bassett's jelly baby now has an individual name and shape, colour and flavour: Brilliant (red - strawberry), Bubbles (yellow - lemon), Baby Bonny (pink - raspberry), Boofuls (green - lime), Bigheart (purple - blackcurrant) and Bumper (orange). The introduction of different shapes and names was an innovation, circa 1989, prior to which all colours of jelly baby were a uniform shape. In 2007, Bassett's jelly babies changed to include only natural colours and ingredients.
There are currently several other brands of jelly babies, as well as supermarket own brands. A line of sweets called Jellyatrics were launched by Barnack Confectionery Ltd to commemorate the Jelly Baby's 80th birthday.
Like most other gummi sweets, they contain gelatin. Jelly babies manufactured in the United Kingdom tend to be dusted in starch which is left over from the manufacturing process where it is used to aid release from the mould. Jelly babies of Australian manufacture generally lack this coating.
Jelly babies are similar in appearance to gummi bears, which are better known outside the United Kingdom, though the texture is different — jelly babies have a firmer outer layer and a softer, less rubbery centre, making them more similar to the American jelly bean.
When Beatlemania broke out in 1963, fans of The Beatles pelted the band with jelly babies (or, in the USA, the much harder jelly beans) after it was reported that George Harrison liked eating them.
In the British television programme Doctor Who, jelly babies were often mentioned in the early series. Although they became most associated with the fourth Doctor (played by Tom Baker), who often randomly offered them to unsuspecting people he encountered in order to defuse tense situations, the second, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and eleventh Doctors also offered them up in different episodes. The Master in The Sound of Drums offers them to his wife aboard the Valiant.
In 2009, a poll of 4,000 British adults voted jelly babies their 6th favourite sweet.
A popular science class experiment is to put them in a strong oxidising agent and see the resulting spectacular reaction. The experiment is commonly referred to as "screaming jelly babies".
Famous quotes containing the words jelly and/or baby:
“I love this child. Red-haired—patient and gentle like her mother—fey and funny like her father. When she giggles I can hear him when he and I were young. I am part of this child. It may be only because we share genes and that therefore smell familiar to each other. . . . It may be that a part of me lives in her in some important way. . . . But for now, it’s jelly beans and “Old MacDonald” that unite us.”
—Robert Fulghum (20th century)
“The trouble with grown-ups was that under the magnificent shell of adulthood, just under,
Waited the baby full of tantrums.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)