As you may know, I’m kind of an environmentalist. Okay, kind of might be a stretch. You might not want to tell me if you don’t recycle, or turn off the water when you brush your teeth, or use re-usable water bottles. But although we eat mostly organic, and mostly homemade, we also live hectic, crazy lives that allow for life’s conveniences to be added in, and sometimes they’re not the perfect, wholesome food we’d like to only eat! So we’re sort of flexible, but try really hard.
As I was looking at some posts on Google + (I’m a huge fan btw, come join me, the community is awesome! +Sarah Thornington or +The Studio by the Sea) I came across a posting by Mother Nature on making your own Peeps. So Adriana and I decided that would be fun, and we made some. We only had one of those floweredy shaped tips for our pastry decorator thing, so they’re a little quirky, they’re sort of punk rock Peeps, and as part of my disclaimer earlier, we totally used the coloured sugar we had in the cabinet. I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to start to dye my own sugar. And plus, there’ll be some of those pre-packaged ones in Adriana’s basket tomorrow (shhhh, don’t tell her, or Mother Nature). It was fun. They are kind of cute. They taste okay (of course I’m not a big Peep fan to begin with). It’s not quite a Pinterest ‘nailed it’ kind of deal, so I’m pretty happy with the whole thing. And I spent an hour hanging with my beautiful daughter, laughing and having fun. Always a good thing.
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That led me to the decision to try some natural dyes for our Easter eggs. Of course, being a juicer, I always have beets in my fridge, until yesterday when I wanted some to dye some eggs a lovely shade of pink. So I searched around and wasn’t really able to come up with too much. The yellow is a combination of mostly Cumin, a little bit of Turmeric and a bit of Paprika which I boiled with the eggs. Of course the pan is yellow, the spoon I used is yellow, I popped our little egg timer in the pot and that’s pretty unique looking now. It was red with white lettering, now it’s sort of reddish orange with bright yellow writing! It’s a bit off I’ve got to say!!! The eggs. Gorgeous. Bright yellow, just lovely.
My next choice was some old Raspberry tea I’ve had for really just too long. I love tea. I drink masses of the stuff. But I like black tea. Tetley’s British Blend tea. By the gallon. (Except of course when Red Rose has nautical theme porcelain figurines, and then I’ll drink that once in a while, but only for the mermaid and lighthouse!!). So when I get other teas they tend to just sit in my cupboard. Or used in my craft room. Or like yesterday, used to dye some eggs. So a bunch of raspberry tea bags, one blackcurrant bag, and one other mixture of a bunch of things that I can’t remember added together and boiled with the eggs makes brown. I was hoping for pinkish. The water was a lovely magenta colour. The kitchen smelled delicious. The eggs. They’re brown. But it’s okay, because my other option was regular tea but I decided it wasn’t worth parting with, and they’d have totally been brown then anyway. So I’m happy with them.
So I had four eggs left, and my husband, who is really quite patient with me even if he does roll his eyes a lot, and say ‘yikes’ more than most people, said do you want the grape juice in the freezer? Now not everyone has grape juice squeezed from fresh grapes last summer in the freezer, but we were lucky enough to. We’d tried making wine a few years before and it was awful, we made modifications and tried again, still really bad. We made some jelly last year, but are still eating it, so the leftover grape juice has been waiting patiently. To dye eggs it appears. Of course it was frozen, so I just popped it on the stove and when there was enough melted popped the eggs in there and boiled them all together. Not my best plan it turns out. (Disclaimer here, I don’t cook. At all. Ever. My husband is a fabulous cook, so I eat what he gives me. It works out really well for us all.) It wasn’t a super plan for a couple of reasons, first it went from hot to boiling over the top and making an enormous mess of grape juice everywhere really quickly. Really, really quickly. Not many bubbles to oh my gosh this is such a mess what am I going to do, really fast. (My stove is wicked clean now, a thorough cleaning wasn’t even on the list today!) And, it turns out maybe I should have put the cooked eggs in the juice instead of cooking them in it. Something happened that caused the grape juice to crystallize, so the outsides of the eggs are a tiny bit unique. On the upside, they’re really sparkly, it’s almost as if I glittered them, and I am a girl who adores glitter, so all in all I’m pleased with them too.
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None of my preparations for Easter came out exactly as I’d thought, but the eggs are pretty, if a bit plain, and the Peeps are kind of cute. All of it was done with love, and what’s more important than love on Easter? Well other than Jesus of course.
Happy Easter to you and yours!
