Easter Fun with Kids

Happy Easter everyone!  This springtime surely hasn’t felt very springy here in the Lowcountry with temperatures hovering around waytoocoldforwaytoolong 🙁  Over the very cold, rainy weekend, my girls and I decided to have a little fun and do our annual Easter egg decorating.  As I am not one known for doing anything the easy way, we (I) decided to try to dye eggs using natural dyes this year, eschewing the artificial PAAS junk for something friendlier to our environment (alas, NOT to my pocketbook).  I was inspired by this post on My Baking Addiction blog.

First step, prep the eggs.  I decided to throw in a few brown ones for an easy out (why there are instructions on how to dye eggs brown is beyond me – just pick up the brown ones and be done with it!).  I stand by my twelve-minute egg method to getting perfect hard-boiled eggs every time.
First up, red cabbage.  We broke up the leaves of 1/4 of a red cabbage and boiled them in water for a few minutes. Never having been a big fan of cabbage, it was a surprise to me (and the girls) that the water turned blue.  We were well on our way to some beautiful blue dye . . . until we added the vinegar, and I quickly remembered high school chemistry with Miss McInnis and the litmus test we did with red cabbage (if you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, just ask a high school student).  Anyway, we ended up with magenta dye again.  In went the eggs.

Next up was grape juice, which was supposed to give us lovely purple eggs.  I had some leftover (not pictured) red wine lying around and I dumped it in, too.  It’s a sin to waste it, right??  And I figured that the alcohol would help it soak into the eggshell . . . who knows.

For yellow eggs, we used a tablespoon of turmeric.  Let me tell you, this is POTENT stuff!  A little surely goes a long way and it smells . . . unusual.

Our first batch of eggs just sitting.  For hours.  And hours.  

We read that spinach could make eggs green.  It was a miserable failure.  We boiled that spinach until there was nothing left but burned spinach in the bottom of the pot and never did the water turn green . . . have to look into that for next year.

Our favorite was raspberries, which was supposed to make lovely pink eggs.  They were a tasty snack, and they made a gorgeous pink sludge.  Unfortunately, none of it stuck to the eggs.  We made egg salad with those 🙂As it turns out, turmeric is the fastest-acting dye of all the ones we tried.  These were done in about an hour. The rest we had to put in the fridge overnight . . . and wait some more.

And, our final products!  Although the cabbage water was pink, the eggs did end up a lovely shade of aqua.  The grape juice/red wine combo gave up some lovely Goth eggs in sparkly black-purple. The brown eggs were, by far, the easiest of them all!  And while we didn’t end up with the conventional pastel eggs of years past, the three of us had a lot of fun together AND we learned something!  My takeaway: there is no time spent in the kitchen that red wine cannot accompany 🙂 Have a very blessed holiday!!