The Art of Easter Eggs Part II

I talked about making Easter Eggs a couple of days ago in my post The Art of Easter Eggs.  The last couple of years I haven't been able to decorate eggs because I've been out of the country. I've had some good Easter dinners but sadly, no egg painting.
So this year I decided to decorate twice. First I made crackled deviled eggs. They are the definition of non permanence but they were a delicious edition to Easter. Although I will say, a couple of my friends were scared of the bright blue colors. They were far less intimidated by the pink eggs. I ate most of the blue ones
and can honestly say they didn't taste any different and they were scrumptious.
Then as soon as we ate our deviled eggs and other appetizers, we moved back to the kitchen and started decorating the eggs that I'd hollowed out.  Each of us walked away with 3 beautiful little keepsakes.

To cut down costs, rather than buying Egg decorating boxes I decided to use supplies I already had in the house. I used food coloring, water and vinegar for 2 blues, pink, and green and then I tried using kool-aid for yellow and red. The kool-aid colors worked just as well as the food dye and they smelled delicious. I wish I hadn't added the vinegar to brighten the colors because then we could have had some drinks afterwards!

For patterns and designs we decided to use crayons.  It worked like a charm.  If you draw on your eggs, the crayon designs stay on even after dipped in colors. We each drew whatever came to mind.
I drew an abstract pattern, flowers and even Nemo!!!

It was seriously amusing and kept us entertained and occupied for about an hour or so; proving that we're just a bunch of little kids at heart. Mind you, the youngest person at the table was 24, so little kids we are not.  I'll definitely by trying more kool-aid colors next year and will most certainly keep up this new tradition.

A convenient way to dry your eggs is to place them into the original egg cartons.

Recipe: Crackled Deviled eggs

Pinterest is full of great ideas. I orginally found a picture of painted deviled eggs and then I came across a picture of crackled eggs and I decided to combine the two for a beautiful and fun to make appetizer. To make the process easier I'm splitting the recipe into 2 parts. The hard boiling and crackling section and then the coloring and deviling section.  It's pretty simple.

Beautiful Crackled Deviled Eggs

Crackled Eggs
12 eggs
food coloring
apple cider vinegar (any clear vinegar will do)
4 sealable plastic baggies

Fill up a large saucepan half way with water and gently add the eggs. Make sure the eggs are covered by at least an inch of water. If you want, you can add a teaspoon of vinegar to the water (I didn't do it but it should help contain egg whites from leaking out if any of the shells crack while cooking). Add a pinch of salt to the water and bring to a boil. Once boiling, cook for about 10 minutes for the perfect hard boil. Drain hot water from the pan and run cold water over the eggs. (If you crack the eggs while their cooling, it will make it easier to peel later on). Let sit in the cool water for a few minutes.
Crack your eggs without peeling them. Put three eggs in each plastic bag and squirt a couple drops of food coloring in as well. Since I was making deviled eggs I didn't use the yellow food coloring. I tried to make purple but failed rather miserably. I think I need to practice my color mixing skills.
Once the eggs and dye are in place, add a few drops of apple cider vinegar to help set the color. Fill each bag with water. Leave the eggs in the bags for about a half an hour.
Drain the bags. I poured the color into red solo cups to dye eggs later on.
Peel the eggs carefully and you have some beautiful crackled eggs that you can either serve as is or as deviled eggs.  Some of my eggs didn't crackle as well as others, so next time I think I'll make sure they're evenly cracked all around.

I also kept the shells because they look beautiful when they dry. I used them to make a center piece as suggested by Kim on Mommysavers. It looked really awesome.

The crackled egg shells fresh out of the dye

My Easter Center Piece using plastic eggs and egg shells

Colored Deviled Eggs
12 hard boiled eggs (in this case, crackled eggs)
2 teaspoons dijon mustard
1/3 cup light mayo
1 tbsp finely grated onion
cayenne pepper to taste
Salt and pepper
Paprika

Using a sharp knife, slice each egg in half lengthwise. Gently remove the yolk halves and place in a small bowl. If you like the final result of your crackle, you can place the whites onto a serving platter at this point.

I, however, decided to be more complicated. I dipped the eggs back into the food coloring. The crackle gets emphasized with further dye and the whites lose all the white color so the yellow yolks will pop beautifully. It also screamed Easter to me.

With a fork mash the yolks, mayo, mustard, onion, and cayenne. You can add a little more mayo if your mixture is looking a little dry. Add a dash of salt and pepper.
At this point you can either simply spoon the yolk mixture into egg white halves or you can put the mixture into a plastic baggie. Cut one corner of the bag and use like a pastry bag to beautifully fill the egg whites.
Sprinkle with paprika and serve.

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.