New Home Design: 'Crack Me' Eggs

The last few years we have really, really enjoyed making these 'crack me' eggs. We found the idea here and it is, one, probably the most popular activity prior to Easter. We usually do them during Holy Week and have been doing them over the last three days (Since starting this post we have completed them)
What are they you ask?
Well simply put they are dyed eggshells filled with chocolate, lollies and/or toys and sealed at the bottom with cup cake paper.

WE simply used a knife to make a crack at the bottom or top of the eggs and emptied our eggs out to use later. I made custard and frittata with ours.
Then weI carefully rinsed out each eggshell. Eden was a great help with this part and she used a finger to scrape away the last bit of the egg white that is attached inside.
Then we filled a pot with water and submerged them in it. Then we brought it to the to a boil. Once boiled we lowered the heat and simmered for 10 minutes. You do need to skim any foam from the top as it appears.
We cooled them by carefully rinsing them and put them on a draining rack on top of the stove and let them dry.

For our dye we can only use red as we only have brown eggs and not white and so can not use any pastel colours for this. However if you have white eggs you can create a variety of colours with this.
For the container above we used two cups of just boiled water and 4 tablespoons of vinegar, as we are not precise in colour we just poured our red food colouring in till we were happy with the colour.
Do not use a metal container or plastic for this part of the process, and do not stir them in the dye as they become splotchy..
We let them soak for five minutes and turned them over for another five.

We then prepared an area to dry the dyed eggs on. Skewers into the top of an egg carton works well and we use on to lift it out of the dyed water and place back into the egg carton to dry.

Vellvin really wanted to do them this year and was very diligent.

However she got tired of wearing the gloves and ended up with a dyed red hand, which she really wasn't worried about.

Our eggs drying.

OK, so when your eggs are dried you get to fill them.
We put all ours inside that egg carton you had the skewers sticking out of and put our choice of lollies on plates. As we are avoiding wheat filled lollies that really restricted our choice of fillings
Of course you could put small toys or home made little items in instead of chocolate.

So we have milk, white and dark chocolate drops and chocolate sultanas.

Then each of the children had a turn at filling 4 eggs with the choice of chocolate. We gave them a set amount each and they had to use no more than that.

Here you can see them filled and ready for the paper tops

Putting them into the eggs is a delicate process so we use an individual egg cup to do it

These are our slips of paper with 'crack me' on them and the cup cake papers.
Some of the children wanted to have 'crack me' in different languages and so used google translate to find out how they were written.