Natural Easter Egg Coloring

While the food dye industry continues to assert that food dye's have no correlation of hyperactivity in children and whole host of other negative impacts, I for one, do not believe them at all.  Just a few weeks ago the Huffington Post came out with an article about how the FDA is looking into changing their official statement on food dyes. If they do, it will be the first thing the FDA has done right in awhile.

In the meantime, lets just go with our guts.  Food dye can't be good, can it? How can anyone think  ingesting something that is bright orange or bright red is OK?  You couldn't pay me a million dollars to give Penelope Gatorade, or jello, or goldfish or store bought Popsicles. 

So I sure as shit wasn't going to dye our Easter Eggs with Red 40.  No ma'am!

I bought three bottles of natural food dye from our local organic grocery store.  They are all created naturally, for example the yellow was made from Turmeric.  Which you can do on your own (click on this link! it takes you to the cutest foodie blog), but I got too busy to make food dye from scratch.

Instead of hard boiling the eggs, I blew out the egg yolks.  I have a farmer deliver eggs to my house every other week, for myself and some of my friends.  I had a few extra dozen one week and I didn't want them to go to waste. So I thought, perfect, will use them for Easter Egg coloring! 

While this way worked, and I have a nice display of long lasting colored Easter Eggs, it was a pain in the you know where to do. I ended up pricking my holes a bit bigger, and thus you can see them very well, to make it easier to blow the egg yolk out.

Also, when I was dying the eggs, they were so light from having nothing in them that I had to hold the egg down in the liquid with my fingers.  Which is hard to do, when you are doing this a with a toddler in her learning tower and she wants to simultaneously break all the eggs and splash colored water all over the kitchen!

I mixed the yellow and blue to make green and the red and blue to make purple to give me a total of 5 different colors.  Here is a good link with the recipe for the coloring. You basically just need vinegar and water.

And since I used farm fresh eggs, as you can see, they are not all white.  The brown eggs did get some color but not nearly as much as the white eggs.  But I actually like how they turned out.  They look exactly like what they are; Natural Easter Eggs!

Then we took the leftover colored water outside for some finger painting fun.  And Penelope decided that dying her brand new Pottery Barn cloth baby doll would be much more fun.  Either that or she decided that it was not cool to have all white baby dolls and that her baby doll collection needed some diversity.  :)