An Egg-stra Special Day

It's an egg-themed post for the holiday! Here is an Easter basket I made up for myself this year. It includes half-a-dozen eggs:


1) The green egg hanging from the basket handle is a blown egg painted in traditional, Central European fashion. It is a gift from a friend in Dresden that I was amazingly able to bring back with me.


2) In the basket are a couple of plastic eggs, one of which is full of pennies for the church youth going on the Appalachian Service Project (ASP) this July to Tennessee. They are collecting a mile of pennies (18,874!) to pay part of the cost of renting vans to take the whole team over there.


3) There are also one Cadbury Creme Egg and one Cadbury Caramel Egg. Sooo good but sooo sweet. Did you know Cadbury only uses cocoa that is certified to be slave-free? (70% of the world's cocoa comes from West Africa, where child and slave labor is rife.)


4) In this shot you can see two of the hard-boiled eggs we dyed (see below).


5) In the hollow pink rabbit are what's left of the bag of malted Robin's Eggs I have been eating all during Lent. I luuurv malted chocolate Easter eggs.


6) The big egg outside the basket was a present from a friend in Dresden. Made of lacquered paper and hollow on the inside, it came with the wooden bunny you see to the right, who is now gracing the window in our kitchen.

As to the dyed eggs, Dear Husband remembered a special dying process his family used when he was young. They added the dye to a big bowl of water, let the colors overlap, and dipped the eggs in and out. They would come out all swirled. Unfortunately, FIL told us that dye was discontinued, but he and MIL had found a work-around: hot water + white vinegar + food coloring + canola oil. You have to mix a tablespoon of everything else together before adding the water.

Because we didn't have any lighter oil, we substituted olive oil. Although it is slightly yellow, we didn't notice any difference with the coloring. We had to dip them three times, each time waiting for the dye to dry and wiping off the oil before dipping again. We only did nine eggs this year, so we just used the primary colors of yellow, red, and blue. Next year if we do more eggs, we may use more colors. And maybe glitter?

Here they are! Tie-dyed eggs. The couple on the bottom-right turned out the best. The two on the left are still raw, insurance, if you will, in case one of us wants to make scrambled eggs--or (better!) chocolate-chip cookies--this week. :-) We'll eat them for breakfast (with Kräutersalz), lunch (egg salad), and dinner (on green salad). Also, DH introduced me to the tradition of "egg battles," where the other person takes a crack at your egg with his or hers, and then you flip them around and do it from the other direction. Unlike when we play racquetball, sometimes I win!

Happy Easter from the three of us!