Oh you guys, my feet are killing me! Back when I lived in New York, my friend Mish and I would walk every weekend along the Hudson, from Canal Street to up into the 100s, often to the top of Central Park, and back. The first time we did this we were both wearing flip flops and by the end of the walk, we were hobbling like old ladies. We re-christened ourselves with old lady names: Mish became Esme, and I was Mavis. To this day, those are the names we call each other. I lost count of the times Mish would unintentionally introduce me to new friends as Mavis.

Call me Mavis today, friends. I’ll answer to it. We are back from a day-long exploration deep into the ‘burbs of Melbourne (more of this in another post). I wore my pretty little suede ankle-boots, which looked rather nice with my skirt but were NOT intended to be used to pound a pavement for six hours or so.

But that’s not actually what I wanted to talk about today. It’s Good Friday, so I thought I’d share with you a couple more eggy Eastery projects I’ve been doing of late. Both involve carefully removing the yolks out of a dozen eggs, just as I did for this hidden message project. Now I have two dozen eggs sitting in pairs in zip-lock bags in my freezer, so you know who to call if you fancy making a quiche.

A smashing egg-hunt

For the first dozen, I made an Easter game for Emily Rose. I painted the hollowed-out eggs with water-colours, having previously stuck a letter on each egg so that it would work as a stencil that, in the end, spelled out HAPPY EASTER.

Then I filled 11 out of the 12 eggs with confetti, and the 12th egg with gold glitter. I sealed each of the eggs and nestled them back into the carton, so you couldn’t tell the glitter egg from any of the confetti eggs. I wrapped them up and posted them to Emily with some simple instructions for a twist on a classic egg hunt:

* Hide the eggs and invite your friends to find them
* When all the confetti eggs have been found, smash them over each others’ heads
* Whoever ends up with a head full of glitter wins the prize

I got the idea here. Pretty cool huh?

Surprise egg-cakes

For the second dozen I baked baby cupcakes, inside the egg shells. First I submerged the eggs in food colouring (with hot water and vinegar): red, orange, blue, purple, yellow and green. Then I mixed up my favourite chocolate cake. I would have preferred to make vanilla, but I was worried the food colouring would come off on the cake batter and look a bit gross. I piped the cake batter through a little hole in the top of each egg.

It was tricky figuring out how much cake batter to add to the eggs. There are loads of instructions on the Internet for doing this, and most people said they overfilled their eggs. I did, too. It was hard to decide when to stop piping the batter because you couldn’t actually see (the hole in the top of the egg was not much bigger than the pipe nozzle). When I pulled the eggs out of the oven, rather than breaking off the overflow, I decided I rather liked the look of it. Instead, I iced it with a kind of snowy lava-looking blob, and topped it with a little candy flower.

I put a dozen of the eggs back into an egg carton and sent Mr B to work with them yesterday. I told everyone to crack the eggs and peel the shell just like they would a hard-boiled egg. Inside, they discovered chocolate cake!

But eggs and chocolate are for Sunday (so you still have time if you want to do something like either of these projects for yourself.) Today was Good Friday and, after my inappropriate footwear-clad ‘marathon’, I was all “craft-shmaft” and “cooking-schmooking.” So we had takeaway fish ‘n chips for dinner. And Madeleine approved, after some initial trepidation, of her first ever hot cross bun.

Happy Easter my dears! I hope you have a wonderful time however you spend it.