Fruit and Veggie Dyed Eggs

A couple of days ago, Miss G and I had the absolute pleasure of having a morning out at Rocky Mountain Flatbread Co. together.  Besides it genuinely being one of our favourite kid-friendly restaurants in the city {I’ve written about it several times in the past – see here and here}, while there, we got to hang out with fellow blogging friends, sample the delicious brunch menu {yum!}, and learn all about dyeing Easter eggs naturally!  Our kind of morning.  

As always, the restaurant’s co-owner/co-founder Suz, did a wonderful job of engaging and educating the littles {and us mamas!} and Miss G left with a bowl of eggs dyed with beets, cabbage, turmeric, and spinach.  And because we enjoyed it so much?  We decided to try our hand at fruit and veggie dyed eggs again today!

To start off, we gathered up some fruits and veggies and prepared our dyes.  Making them was really easy – we simply placed the produce in a covered pot along with 1.5 cups of water, brought it to a boil, and then turned down the heat and let it simmer for about 30 minutes {still covered}.  I had all of the elements going at once during this process, so it wasn’t long before all of our dyes were done.

Here’s what our dyes looked like when they were ready to go…  You can obviously play around with the ratios as much as you like in order to create lighter or darker colours, but with our 1.5 cups of water, we used 3 small beets {chopped}, 2 tablespoons of smoked paprika, 1 half of a small head of purple cabbage {chopped}, the skins of 3 large yellow onions, about 3/4 cup of frozen blueberries, and the skins of 3 large purple onions.  {Now to figure out what to do with all of the peeled onions I have sitting in a bag in my fridge…}

As the dyes cooled, I prepared our eggs using a little trick Suz taught us at our workshop…  Steaming the eggs instead of boiling them!  This was really easy as I just popped a metal colander into my big soup pot with a couple of inches of water in it.  Then I added the eggs, put the lid on, and steamed them on high for about 15 minutes.

The verdict?  Just 2 eggs out of 24 came out with small cracks… Pretty awesome considering I usually lose at least a third to cracking when boiling them.

Before dyeing our eggs, we dipped each one into white vinegar for a minute to help the dye ‘stick’.  Because our eggs were still warm, they were dry and ready to be dyed in no time at all.

Then onto the real fun!

To start off, Miss G placed a couple of eggs in each bowl of dye and simply let them soak up the colour.

Of course the longer you leave them in the dye, the more vibrant the finished egg will be.

Afterwards we experimented with dip-dyeing half an egg at a time, both vertically and horizontally…  The ones dip dyed with a white stripe left in the middle turned out to be some of my very favourites.

Aren’t they just gorgeous?!

And to think that all of those pretty shades were made using 100% natural dyes we made ourselves!

I’m pretty sure fruit and veggie dyed eggs will be an Easter tradition from now on.

 

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