Behold, our Easter table centrepiece! The Podlings and I dyed some eggs this afternoon, which Tom found mildly diverting and Lily thought was the best way to spend an afternoon that anyone ever invented. She was particularly obsessed with the one egg that cracked during boiling and wandered around telling everyone "Egg cwacked" for about an hour. I only had red and blue food colouring to hand, so was only able to make pink, blue and purple eggs. This was rather vexing to Tom, who had decided he wanted yellow eggs! I think they turned out well, with the exception of one egg that flatly refused to change colour, despite all the other eggs in the pan turning blue. Anyone know why this might be? I know I'm a scientist by training, but I didn't cover dyeing Easter eggs in my thesis!The children enjoyed the eggs so much, I wanted to put them on display where they could easily see them. This evening, I took one of my two-tier cake stands and made 'nests' from raffia (yes, I have a lot of raffia on hand at the moment!). I then simply placed the eggs around the two tiers and put the whole thing in the middle of the dining room table as a centrepiece. I know the Podlings will be thrilled to see it when they come down tomorrow morning.
2 comments:
Maybe it was to do with different ages of the eggs? The protein in the shell may degrade a bit which prevents uptake of food colour? :S
Or, if the eggs are from farms then maybe it was a fertilised eggs and the hormonal/protein differences between that and unfertilised eggs gives them different qualitities - it wouldn't benefit fertile eggs to change colour in the wild as it would make them more apparrent to potential predation, so maybe it's an evolutionary advantage to resist changing colour once fertilised?
I like your reasoning. Leave it to an animal scientist to come up with some good ideas! I hope it wasn't fertilised as I fed the egg to the Podlings for their tea! It didn't look like it had anything resembling a chicken in it when I cut it up at least!
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