I have taken photos of a couple of recent(ish) attempts and I wanted to share them.
As a child, Christmas and Easter were the two biggest celebrations in our family (I think mainly due to my father's Baltic heritage). Every Easter right until dad's passing we made onion skin stained Easter eggs and Pasha (I will talk more about Pasha later on).
This technique produces an awesome result with minimal effort and just a little foresight.
A couple of months before Easter I start collecting onion skins from cooking onions used around the house (although, I don't think a supermarket would mind if you asked nicely to collect some from them). I try to keep them as whole as possible to make it easier to wrap them around the eggs. I tried with purple skins one year and they made the same finished product as the regular old cooking onions so I use them (plus the skins, if removed carefully, seem to wrap almost perfectly around an egg).
Ingredients
1 dozen eggs
onion skins (enough to completely wrap around the eggs)
paper towels
elastics
Here is my technique:
1. One at a time take an egg and wrap it completely in onion skin (I have heard that if you wet the egg first the skin will stick better and give you less hassles in the next step). I leave mine dry and wrap.
2. Wrap a paper towel around the onion skin and egg trying your best to make sure the skin is touching all parts of the egg.
3. Carefully wrap an elastic around the paper towel.
4. Place eggs in a large pot filled with enough cold water to cover the eggs.
5. Bring to a boil and cook for 8 minutes.
6. Once cooked, run the pot under cold water to cool the eggs.
7. Unwrap (if you prefer a shiny egg you can rub them with a little butter or oil).
Around our house, we always have an 'egg war' on Easter Sunday. One person holds an egg prefectly still with the pointy end facing up, his or her opponent clashes another egg's pointy side against the stationary egg. The one whose egg remains unbroken is the victor! As a second chance, the defeated party can flip their egg over for another round (but the blunt end never really fares well).
We have continued the tradition the last few Easters after dad's passing as a tribute to him and the memories of years gone by. Our son already loves egg war, hopefully he has the same memories of it that I do when he's a grown man.
I took a few pics of step 4 onward, our son was helping during the earlier steps and we had a few casualties resulting in less than a complete dozen eggs. :)
