Remember how I told you that some of the hard coked eggs recipes I found online called for placing the eggs directly on the oven racks to bake? Well, I tried it…and guess what happened! Just as I was about to open the oven door to remove the eggs after baking them for thirty minutes, I heard a LOUD pop! I was really worried about finding Egg Chernobyl when I opened the oven door! Especially because it would mean that I would be forced to clean my very dirty oven!
Thankfully, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but an egg had exploded! One whole end of the shell had blown off and was partially lying on the rack next to the egg and shell shrapnel was (and still is) scattered all over the bottom of the oven. Two other eggs had large cracks in them as well.
After removing the eggs to an ice water bath and then peeling them, I found that the eggs didn’t have the burn marks as dark as the original eggs in the muffin pan had. Each egg had two marks where it had rested on the oven rack, but the marks were much lighter in color. I liked that the “burn” marks on the eggs were lighter and smaller with this method, but only 75% of the eggs made it through baking without a crack! And I really need to clean up the eggshell in the bottom of my oven now.
After that mess, a new thought came to me…mini muffin pan! I tried it out and the eggs fit perfectly! No more wobbling around like they did in the normal sized muffin pan. I baked another dozen this way and the eggs turned out great! Not a single egg cracked or exploded in the oven! When I was moving the eggs to the ice water bath, I accidentally dropped one into the bowl, which then smashed into the egg it landed on and cracked them both. I peeled the cracked ones and didn’t notice any “burn” marks at all!So, I would say mini muffin pan is the way to go!
Over the years we’ve always used the PAAS tablets to dye eggs, and they were OK, but this year I didn’t buy any and instead decided to give the food color and vinegar method a go. I used the 10 eggs I had from my chickens that had survived my clumsiness with the mini muffin pan baking experiment and also baked 6 store-bought white eggs to use. I mixed white vinegar, water and food coloring in glass custard dishes and covered everything in newspaper and I was ready to go! I decided to use red, orange, blue and green for my eggs.
As soon as I placed the first eggs in the custard dishes, I realized that the eggs wouldn’t fully submerge and were going to end up with weird ovals on the side that was sticking out of the dye, so I transferred the eggs to pint glasses and poured the dye mixtures from the custard dishes into the glasses. I used a plastic spoon and fork in each dish to lower the egg in as well as to remove them to check the progress of the color; when I removed the eggs to dry, I found that having the fork on the bottom of the egg helped to minimize the amount of dye mixture I transferred with the egg. Once each egg had reached an intensity of color I was happy with, I removed the eggs to my handy-dandy drying rack.
One of the things I always hated about the PAAS kits was using the package with the egg cutouts to dry my eggs; it always left a ring around the egg where it rested on the package. I found this suggestion on MarthaStewart.com. Actually, Martha used foam and her pins were all even and perfect, but I’m the type of gal that modifies ideas to work with what I have on hand, so I used a flattened cardboard box. I laid out a grid of 1” squares in just a minute or so and then went to work installing the pins. After just a couple pins, I realized that my fingers were going to hurt if I kept pressing them in by hand. So, I grabbed my “lady-size” hammer and went to work tapping the needles into place. It worked great! The only issue I had was those little “bubble drops” of dye mixture you can see in the photo above; they left a darker circle at the bottom of the first eggs I dyed. After that, I started using a folded up paper towel to wick the drop out from under the egg.
I didn’t think that my brown eggs would turn out all that great, that’s why I went ahead and baked the white eggs I had as well. But, after dying them all, I was amazed with how brilliant the colors were in my brown eggs! I actually liked them much more! In the photos below, the brown eggs are on the left and the white eggs are on the right.
While I was looking around on MarthaStewart.com I found her method for making marbleized Easter eggs. I decided to give it a try, because by this point I really wanted to dye a couple dozen more eggs! This method basically requires taking eggs that are dyed and placing them into a contrasting or darker dye color that has a little olive oil added to it and swirled about by a fork.
When I placed the white egg that was dyed sort of pink into the blue dye with oil added, I realized immediately that “eyeballing” the olive oil wasn’t a great idea. Basically the entire surface of my dye was covered by oil and it was impossible to achieve the “curlicues of oil on the surface” MS’s site describes. So, I threw out the blue oil and dye mixture and used a TINY amount of oil to my green dye. I found that I lack the ability to create oil curlicues, so I just kinda swished the oil around a bunch and quickly placed the egg in; turns out the green dye just wasn’t really dark enough to really show up on the blue egg. The yellow egg marbled in green dye turned out really cool!
I really had fun dyeing eggs today! It makes me excited to share the experience with Little Man next year. I’ll definitely be trying the marbleized eggs again, they were really cool. I played around some with crayons on eggs, too. My artwork leaves quite a bit to be desired, but if you were good at drawing you could probably accomplish some great looks!
Today, I hopped over to Dysfunction Junction to join the Linkin’ with my Ladies hop; check it out for lots of great blogs as well as link ups for Bloglovin’.
I’m even more excited to announce that I’ve got plans for a new hop that I’m working on! It’s going to be a fun and easy way to generate a blog post with minimal effort and then link up to share! Be sure to stop back by on Saturday for the inaugural hop!
Quite an egg adventure. Found you through the Pink Mommy Fun Friday blog hop and I am following you.
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