Easy Easter Eggs

With this Sunday being Easter I thought something a little holiday inspired would be fitting.  Dying Easter eggs has always been something my siblings and I look forward to each year.  The bowl in the fridge full of extravagantly decorated edible decorations is a simple reminder of the approaching holiday.  As kids we always bought the packages with the dissolving tablets, the stickers, crayons to create white spaces, and those plastic bands you could put around an egg and would shrink to fit.  Now that I'm an adult I'm lucky enough to have a husband who's supportive of my occasional desire to relive my childhood but as always I set out to find a cheaper way.

I did a little research and found that combining white vinegar, boiling water, and food coloring would have pretty much the same results and as I had all of those items it was a no brainer.  If you spend much time on Pinterest you may have seen eggs where the color has seeped through onto the egg white.  I decided to recreate that look by tapping the eggs on the counter to create cracks in them before slipping them into the dye. 

I love it when ingredients are simple.  You could use bowls or glasses, we always used mugs growing up and it seemed wrong to do it any other way.

A cookie sheet with paper towels and a cooling rack makes clean-up a breeze! 

While the water was boiling in the teapot I went ahead and put white vinegar and food dye into the mugs.  The colors on the left are purple and pink.

Boiling water from the teapot was added.  I didn't do any further mixing as the act of pouring the water in did that for me.

Woohoo!  Also, it's a lot harder to be patient with this when there aren't 3 other people around to give input on depth of color...

While this is a fantastic method for letting the eggs dry you will get spots on the parts of the shell that rest against the rack, if this doesn't bother you great, if it does you may want to revert to the classic wholes in cardboard method.

Woohoo!  You can see some of the cracks in the shells at this point.  In the future I'll be less tentative about cracking them so as to get better lines.

I know the focus is off but this is what they ended up looking like peeled.  I really want to do this again with many more cracks and make deviled eggs out of them.  How cool would that be?!

Directions:
1 tsp White Vinegar
1/2 C boiling water
food color (20 drops will give you similar colors to mine, but experiment!  My package actually had directions on the back for how many drops to use when mixing colors which was helpful.)

So there you have it!  If you've got little kids and want to dye eggs without quite the mess or spending any real money this is definitely the way to go.  If you've got a favorite way to decorate Easter eggs let me know, I'd love to try something new next year. 

Thanks for reading!