The Art of Easter Eggs

When I was a little kid I used to love painting Easter Eggs with my mother and brother. We'd wait all week long in anticipation. Mom would boil the eggs on the Friday before Easter and we'd let them cool until Saturday morning. At best Mom could keep us busy with other activities until around noon. But as soon as lunch was over, there was no stopping us. We were going to paint those eggs.
I remember the painting kits in their pastel boxes with bunnies and chicks. They always showed these beautiful eggs painted in gorgeous colors and patterns; ones that as children we wanted to emulate but had no idea how.
We'd mix up the tablets in clear plastic cups with water and white vinegar and watch as the colors magically appeared.
And then the fun really started. Each kit came with thin wire spoons that you had to balance your egg on.  When we were really little, Mom would help steady our tiny hands and then when I got old enough I would push her away and say, "I can do it. I don't need help". A couple of years later my brother would say the same and mom would watch us carefully and do clean up after our many spills.  Patient, I remember her somehow always being so patient with us even when we started arguing with one another. We could never agree on which colors to use and we always argued over who got to decorate how many eggs. I remember Mom looking at us with a smile. She'd scold but mostly she stayed calm. The scolding and yelling came from Grams. Grams had no patience for our messy arts and crafts.
But we loved working with Mom on our projects.
I remember there were years when I refused to use pink because I thought it was "icky" and "girly" (I was obviously a tom boy, a trend I mostly grew out of) and other years where I would only paint my eggs in shades of purple or blue.  It was fun to experiment, dip the eggs into one color and then another to see what would happen. We would always be disappointed to see that mixing pink, orange, yellow, green and blue only resulted in a dull brown color. It took skill to accomplish tie dye and we just didn't have that kind of hand eye coordination. I still don't (I'm pretty sure my bro doesn't either).
It took us about an hour to decorate the eggs, dye, stickers, stencils, pens... By the end of the hour, the dye was everywhere; on the kitchen table, on the floor, on us... on the dog. I'm not sure how we did it, but I distinctly remember Thunder getting a whole lot of coloring on her. Fortunately she wasn't a white dog or else we'd have had a problem. We'd giggle and Mom and Grams would clean up and help us into clean clothes and we'd let our eggs dry.
I loved decorating those eggs. They were never gorgeous although Mom always said they were. They were generally a mish mosh of colors melting into one another but they were pretty to her because we had spent the time and effort making them.  They would be center pieces on our dining room table for about a week.
Easter Sunday they sat in their baskets in the middle of the table surrounded by all of the amazing food that Mom and Grams would cook up and then for the next days they would stay on display.
Then just as suddenly they were gone.

Unfortunately hardboilded eggs only last for so long. And then they can become stink bombs (Paul was quite good at cracking the eggs at just the right moment).
I don't know if mom ate the eggs or just threw them away at discreet moments, but they disappeared never to be seen again, only to be remembered in photographs.

I love photos and memories but I would have loved to be able to actually have some of those eggs that we so laboriously created. I don't remember who suggested it, or how I found the idea, but a couple of years ago I finally had the solution.

You can keep the eggs you decorate if they're hollow. With no yolk and white there's no way for the egg to go bad.

It's actually a simple process and it's nice because you wind up with keepsakes. I've been hollowing eggs throughout the week as I need them to cook. So I've made French Toast, Spinach pie, Asparagus and Canadian Bacon Quiche, and Carrot Cake. As a result I have 8 hollow eggs to play with tomorrow.

DIY: How to Hollow Eggs
6 eggs (or however many you're going to paint)
a pin (a safety pin or long needle)
a bowl

Very carefully use your pin to poke a hole into the top and bottom of the egg. Use the pin to make the hole on the bottom (the slightly wider side of the egg) slightly larger. It should be about a centimeter or so wide. Make sure the thin skin below the shell is pierced through as well and then blow through the top of the egg. It's going to take quite a bit of air, but the yolk and white should spurt right out into the bowl.

Use the eggs to make french toast or an omelette, or a scramble or really anything that requires eggs.

Rinse the eggs out with water and let dry. Decorate to your hearts content.
So long as you store the eggs carefully, they should stand the test of time.

This year I'm going to decorate again for the first time in years. It's going to be a group project on Easter Sunday before we eat dinner and we'll use the eggs as a center piece for the table.  I think we're going to use Coolaid instead of the boxes of paint and then I'll write about how that turns out as well!

Then I'm going to hold onto these eggs for a long time.