Friday, April 15, 2011

Green Easter Eggs


Since Easter weekend starts on the same day as Earth Day this year, I thought I'd talk about something my kids get really excited about - making Easter eggs. Last year we received the infamous Dora egg colouring kit from a well-meaning relative and the kids set to work colouring the eggs, table, fingers, clothes and anything else within a 2 m radius of the table. I became alarmed when days later those little fingers were still coloured purple. So this year the girls and I set out to make our own dyes. Being a former chemist, and yet an anti-FD&C kind of gal, I was almost as excited as my kids. This time we started with hard boiled eggs (duh...lesson learned from last year's tears, piles of egg shells and goo) ...that you can eat if things don't end well for the eggs. So here are the ones we tried: Onion skins for orange, beets for red-pink, frozen blueberries for pink-purple, tumeric for yellow and an unsuccessful attempt at green from frozen spinach. You could try any number of coloured fruits, veggies, bark & seeds. Experiment! I chopped up the fruits & veggies, covered them with water, added a splash of vinegar and simmered them for 1/2 hour. I then placed the eggs in a container of each dye and rolled them around for a while. The longer you keep them in there, the darker they will get. If you want to dazzle your preschoolers, add some baking soda to the blueberry dye and watch it turn colour. Now that's better living through chemistry!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Fantastic! Thanks for working out the trial and error for the rest of us :)
-Stephanie Brown
Halifax NS