March 25, 2008

easter bento bunny

I don't know what it is about those cute Smarties-coloured bento egg moulds........they're just so much fun, and extremely addictive! I mean, who could resist eating an egg shaped liked a rabbit, or a fish, and the whole process is just so simple and amazing.

You take an egg....
pierce the end to stop it from cracking.....
boil it for 10 minutes - and then when it's done, you peel it and slip it into the rainbow coloured magic box, (in this case, orange) and a little later when it's gone cold......hey presto!.....you no longer have just any old boiled egg, you have a perfectly formed, totally cute, and irresistible bunny.

Of course, I couldn't just leave it at that!......... so, as it's Easter I decided to colour it as well. I wanted something suitably bunny-like so I decided on pink. I've made tea eggs before so I thought I would try the same process but with the egg totally peeled. I chose beetroot as my colouring of choice, but found that when cooking the beetroot it disappointingly gave off a rather unpleasant murky orange brown colour - not what I was after at all!

Undeterred however, I tried again, but this time with grated raw beetroot steeped in cold water, and that gave me a much better result. I soaked my boiled eggs in the beetroot water for about 40 minutes, and found that I got a lovely deep velvety pink, although you can vary the shade, depending on how long you leave the egg to soak.
Given that boiled eggs are not always the most appealing of things to eat, this is a fantastic, albeit subversive, way to persuade reluctant egg eaters to give them a try. At the very least they just look pretty in a Bento box!

3 comments:

Pixie said...

Awww, it's adorable! too adorable to eat!!!

Nic said...

Wow! I've never seen anything like it - it's amazing!
And to think you can eat it too...

Nilmandra said...

Your moulded egg turned out perfect! It's difficult to get the right sized eggs sometimes for some moulds. The beetroot colour worked really well too. Much better than just from a bottle of food colouring :)