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Make Your Own Easter Eggs: More Yummy, Less Packaging

It’s Easter time, a much anticipated time for many young children and adults alike. As with any celebration, it can become over commercialised. One can feel the reluctance to purchase over packaged  and over priced Easter eggs made from inferior chocolate.

Seeing as we’re all about reducing packaging, we’d like to ask you to give some thought to packaging when you select Easter eggs in the shop. There’s often a foil wrapper, plastic covering and a sizeable printed box and sometimes in addition, many individually wrapped items inside.

Avoid some of the excess packaging and have some fun making your own Easter eggs. Here are some great ideas.

Make your own chocolate Easter eggs

Buy egg-shaped moulds and good quality chocolate (300g makes approx 8 small eggs) to decorate and personalise. Take a look at this easy recipe from BBC Foods.

If you’re really brave, you can even makes ones with condensed milk cream filling. (Yikes!)

Decorate and fill eggs

This is fun to do with children. Invite some friends round and give it a go – it might even become an Easter tradition.  There are many, many ways to decorate eggs. It is an ancient tradition that extends beyond traditional Christian Easter celebrations back to pagan times when eggs were used to symbolise fertility and new life in spring in the Northern Hemisphere. If you ask friends from Northern Europe, they may have lovely stories and ideas for decorating eggs at Easter.  If you have some, we’d love you to share them with us.

The basic formula

Prick a hole in both ends of the egg with a needle and gently widen one of the holes. Blow the egg out into a bowl and rinse the eggshell in some water and vinegar.  Allow to dry.

Then the fun starts.  Here are a few decorating ideas:

  1. Add different colour food dyes to some water and vinegar in small bowls large enough to dip dye the eggs.  Leave the eggs in for longer to achieve darker colours.
  2. Wrap the egg in rubber bands before you dip into the dye to make stripes.
  3. Apply small leaves or flower shapes before you dip the egg into the dye.
  4. Dip parts of the egg into melted wax to achieve different colours or paint on dots and stars in the wax (remember to supervise children).
  5. Put a secret message in to plug the hole.
  6. Fill the bottom of the egg with sweets and close up the end with cotton wool or a sticker.

Enjoy and Happy Easter!