I have to admit, that I am not a big fan of dying eggs and have not done it in in the last few years. But when I read an article about dying eggs only with natural ingredients, I got excited. Also thought that passing on traditions like this is important, also to make celebrations like Easter special for the kids. Little Bear also liked the idea, so we decided to give a go and started to search for ingredients which we had at home.
From the ideas we read about, we have found coffee, onion peel, curcuma, nettle tea, walnut leaves, elderberry juice.
We started cooking the eggs and the dyes at the same time. For the dyes we simply mixed the ingredients with water and started to boil.
Be very careful when you have several pots with boiling water and kids around! Especially that they are really curious to see what is happening with the different ingredients and colours.
When the dyes seemed dark enough, we stopped cooking, added a bit of vinegar, and placed the hot eggs into the hot dyes and let them stay and cool.
How did the different food dyes worked?
When we boiled the coffee beans, they seemed a bit too pale, so added some used coffee grounds and this way it worked fine.
The walnut tea was not strong enough, so we skipped it completely, because it did not stain the egg even after one hour. Instead, we used the elderberry juice twice, dyeing two eggs because it was really strong. We left one egg longer, the other one for a shorter time.
The curcuma was also very strong and the egg came out beautifully yellow.
The onion peel was really interesting, because the dye itself looked very transparent, but in 1-2 hours the egg became really nice orange coloured.
The last one with the nettle tea was everything, but green and we almost gave up on it, but after a few hours it came out with an undefinable colour, but fitting nicely the other five eggs.
So the end result is not even similar to the eggs you dye with the colours you can buy in the shops, but for us their pastel colours looks much nicer and more natural and we loved the whole making of them!
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