For now, my kids are still into dying eggs for Easter. Usually we cover the kitchen table with newspaper, hard boil the eggs, and rely on Paas for all our egg-dying needs.
But when Easter falls in March and your March looks somewhat like this…
We are not driving anywhere today…
Driving out to Walgreens to pick up egg dye just isn’t the best use of your day.
So we improvised.
Bad tasting but makes a great dye.
Earlier in the month my daughter needed packages of sugary water flavoring for a school project. Long story but, since the dollar store didn’t have Kool-Aid, we bought some FlavorAid instead. At 99cents for a pack of twelve it looked like a great deal. However, there is a reason FlavorAid is so cheap. Imagine the worst fake fruit flavor ever, multiply that by 100x and then sweeten it up with twenty tablespoons of sugar and you might come close to the flavor of Flavor-OMG-this-tastes-awful-Aid, (named for the fact that the flavor needs help?)
Cherry FlavorAid made the egg speckled red
Needless to say we had a lot of it left over. So that’s what we used! Dissolved in a cup of water and three tablespoons of vinegar, it made a fine egg dye. Some of the eggs came out speckled too, which was an unexpected, but not unwelcome effect.
The Kiwi Watermelon flavor made green eggs. The Lemonaid flavor made yellow eggs. For some reason the Grape flavor made brown eggs, but they kinda looked like chocolate, so we didn’t mind. The longer the eggs stayed in the dye bath, the darker they came out.
It took a little while for them to dry and until they did, they were susceptible to smears. So if you do this project, expect some finger color transfer.
Now there’s a nice looking Easter egg.
My youngest had the idea to wrap some of the eggs in rubber-bands before submerging them into the dye cups and those eggs had great results! I think the rubber-band trick would work with any type of dye.
We’ve gotten similar results marking up the egg with a white crayon or a wax candle, but the rubber-banding was less labor intensive.
The blue coloring came from the Berry Punch FlavorAid.
Also, the colors did not seep through the shell into the egg itself, which sometimes happens when using regular food coloring.
Would we do it again? Yes! FlavorAid + Egg Dying = Project Success.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? If this stuff can color eggs, what’s it doing to your body if you drink it?
Photographs © Karin Blaski, 2016
