Easter Egg Dying Trials and Tribulations

For years, I have been wanting to try using natural dyes for eggs. Finally, I tried it and it seems my lack of patience got in the way of complete success.

Yesterday was Earth Day, which seemed like the perfect time to try dying eggs with natural ingredients. For years I had read about onion skins, violets, red cabbage, turmeric and beet juice. Because I hadn’t planned ahead, I had to make do with the ingredients I had on hand. Per my usual recipe and project development method, I scanned a number of articles online about the subject at hand and then decided to wing it.

Since I had to hard boil the eggs still, it seemed like a good idea to just boil the eggs in the colored water. So, I added eggs to one pan, dumped a can of beets with their juice on top, filled with water just to cover and added a tablespoon of vinegar. In the other pan, I sprinkled in about a tablespoon of turmeric with a tablespoon of vinegar.

First, I brought each pan to a boil. This is when my first disappointment occurred. My new range has a power boil setting, which I used for the turmeric eggs. Two of them must have gotten too hot too fast and cracked.  I turned down the heat after each pot boiled and kept the eggs at a simmer for 15 minutes. The turmeric eggs were a beautiful yellow so I plunged them into a cold bath and put most of them back in the egg carton and into the fridge to await the Easter bunny.

The beet eggs were not very pink so I strained the red juice, added ice and decided to keep the eggs in the juice in the fridge overnight for extra color.  They were on their way to being a pretty pink. At the last minute, I decided I would shoot for a few orange eggs and tossed a couple yellow turmeric eggs into the beet juice. Bad idea.

Mini Whipped and I opened the beet juice container this morning and found a bunch of brown eggs. The turmeric is so strong, it colored all the pink eggs enough to turn them in to a light brown. I could have just purchased brown eggs from the store and let the chickens do the work! (see photo below – those WERE white eggs at the start) Mini Whipped began whimpering, “I wanted pink eggs…”

I distracted her by saying we should peel open the cracked eggs. It worked… inside we found interesting marbled colors on the egg white.  Mini Whipped cheered up, “Oh Mom, I see pink INSIDE. That is enough for me.”  If only this toddler was so amenable all the time.