I feel the weight of the world has been lifted since my last blog post. So how about we get back to some fun Easter eggs! There are lots of new ways floating around the internet on how to dye eggs. Yep, no longer do Moms have to suffer with the messy old fashioned version of boiled water, food coloring, and vinegar! There is a much simpler way and I’m excited to show you. You still need food coloring, but we’ve replaced the water and vinegar with a dry simple ingredient – rice! That’s right no more drippy colored mess! This is by far the simplest way to dye Easter eggs! Another benefit of using the rice method is being able to layer pretty colors and create cool effects.
You’ll want to start with white hard boiled eggs. If you’ve had bad luck boiling eggs before without over cooking them, be sure and read my blog post how to make perfect hard boiled eggs. White eggs are ideal of course to maximize color results, but with brown eggs being more popular now days we did experiment and I’ll show you those results at the end of this blog post.
ITEMS NEEDED
Boiled eggs
Basic food coloring
Rice
Several plastic containers with lids
Start by placing rice into each plastic container. The amount of rice you need will vary on the size of container you use. We used about 1/2 cup per container. Squeeze the color of food coloring you want to use in each rice container. The amount of food coloring you use is kind of tricky, it depends if you want a subtle or dramatic effect. We started with 20 drops and some of the colors we ended up adding a lot more coloring. Just make sure your bottles are 1/2 full if they’ve already been used. We love the neon food coloring colors too!
Then simply add the lid and shake the rice to distribute the color. Now for the fun part!
Place the hard boiled egg into the colored rice, add the lid and shake again. I was worried our eggs might break, I was gentle at first and then we got pretty rough and our egg didn’t crack. You’ll want to shake a good 30-60 seconds, even longer if you want. The longer you shake and the more food coloring you have in the rice the darker the egg will be. After shaking the egg should be completely dry to lift with your fingers, brush off any remaining rice with your fingers. If you used a lot of food coloring it may be just barely wet and you can scoop it out with a spoon, it should dry very quickly. Place the eggs directly into a bowl, that’s it!
We had so much fun experimenting that we ended up making up even more colors!
Our first purple egg had less food coloring in the rice and had a very pretty look, it felt completely dry and the coloring left no marks on our fingers. Then we added more food coloring to see what would happen. We definitely got a darker dramatic effect, the eggs felt just slightly wet removing and it did leave a very faint color on our finger tips. It was dry in about a minute though.
It’s really fun, Ashley loved doing this and she’s 15 so I know smaller kids would have a blast doing this. I love the pretty speckled effect the rice method creates! Then we decided to get creative and layer some colors. We lightly shook each egg in 2-3 different colors. I love how the pink and blue egg turned out! It’s my favorite.
Ashley did a combination of purple and orange for this really neat effect. She called them dragon eggs, this is for all the boy Moms out there. Make dragon eggs for Easter! This would be really fun for a themed birthday party too!
Another favorite of using the rice method is easy clean up. Just throw the colored rice in the trash and simply rinse the containers out in the sink. There were no food coloring stains left in our plastic containers, even in our darkest blue and purple. I’m telling ya, this is the easy way to go!
We had so much fun and ran out of white eggs, and used our brown eggs. Ever wonder how brown eggs take dye? The green, yellow and red didn’t turn out as great as I hoped but the blue and purple looked great. Blue was the prettiest with the brown eggs, but we also went heavier on the food coloring too.
These were just so fun and pretty to make! Dying eggs is such a fun family project, we’re going to be making several more batches before Easter. Spring is here… and I’m just so happy!
Love these! Such a better, easier and neater way to dye eggs!