Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great Easter weekend doing the things that make this a seasonal holiday – chocolate bunnies, egg hunts, ham dinners, spring outings.  (Or if you are religious, activities less candy oriented than those I’ve just mentioned.)

This year I really wanted to try the vegetable dye tutorials that have become popular over the last few years.  It’s been many years I’ve done any egg dyeing with kits or not, so I can’t say I even remember how much dye soaks through the shell to tint the egg and how much we’ve been eating through our childhood.  But aside from the health hazards of Red No.5, I love the muted tones of using vegetables and spices.  So despite lack of interest with some visiting nephews in dyeing eggs (I admit for 10 and 12 year old boys, it’s a pretty meh activity compared to Netflix),  I went to town at my local produce store.

I made a quart each of 5 vegetables dye 2 days ahead of time- and in retrospect that was way too much.  Making about 2 cups is fine for a quart jar because your eggs will displace some of the liquid.  Next time…I have here red cabbage (produces blue eggs), beets (a rosy pink), turmeric, pandan (a leaf used in Southeast Asian cooking and gives a bright green juice) and a mix of beet and cabbage juice in hopes of getting purple.

Spinach totally did not work for me.  The yellow is turmeric, 4 tablespoons for 4 cups of water.  Even with simmering, the pandan and turmeric settled to the bottom of the jar and didn’t give me much color at all.  And the pandan actually just turned a horrible color when I cooked it so…let’s just say green is tricky and I definitely didn’t get a good one.
The basic recipe would be:

1. 2 cups of vegetable – beet, red cabbage
2. 4 cups of water
3. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 15 mins
4. Add 2 tablespoons of vinegar and 2 tablespoons of salt
5. Strain and cool
6. Soak hard boiled eggs overnight.  
7. Remove the eggs from the dye and allow to dry.  If you like, rub a dab of vegetable oil over the eggs to give a slight sheen.

I also attempted to wrap some leaves I picked up in the park around the eggs to leave an imprint.  Why not go all out, eh?

Pretty!  Here they are after they’ve been removed from the dye.  You can see how vibrant some of the color is on the cheesecloth, compared to the egg.  Red cabbage gave a beautiful blue color and was my favorite…which you can see from all the blue eggs.  The purple turned out really wonderful on the cloth, as did the beet.  The imprints were a bit blurry, so using pantyhose for a firmer grip might work better next time.

And the eggs after drying.  Ah, they’re so pretty that I’m going to regret cracking them open (and I may regret that I made so many because how much egg salad or deviled eggs can one person eat?  Plus, I’ll let you guys know if the vinegar and salt which is needed to set the color has flavored the eggs unpleasantly.)  I’m quite tempted to dye some raw eggs so I can blow out the yolks and keep just the shells for decoration.  Anyhow, when they’re all stacked up in a bowl, I think of some interesting stones or dinosaur eggs and I love them.  I’d love them more if they were filled with chocolate, but that that’ll be some kind of hot Pinterest tutorial next year! 🙂

Who else ventured into vegetable dyes this year?  And how did they turn out?  I’d love to see :).