Happy Easter

We never got around to putting up our Easter decorations this year, since we've been living in a museum while our house is on the market, so it hasn't felt very "Eastery". But we made up for it this weekend. I'd seen in Martha Stewart and Sunset various techniques for egg dying that I wanted to try this year, so on Saturday night we had friends over to try them out. Sunset says to dye brown eggs for rich jewel tones and Martha says to use electrical tape to mask off areas to make silk screen like designs. We did both!

I started out by boiling some brown eggs. I don't know why but for some reason I was fascinated with the eggs while they were boiling. Look at the bubbles that come out of the eggs in a straight line. What's with that?



Our friends Brock and Layla brought over white eggs to add to the mix. We used McCormick's food dye in regular and neon colors which we mixed using recipes from a blog I found, added to 2 TBS white vinegar and 1 cup just boiled water in mason jars.



Then we used electrical tape to cut out designs using pinking shears, scissors, and exacto blades. After the tape was cut we applied them to eggs making sure the tape was burnished on really well (lesson learned since my first attempt the tape fell right off), and dipped them into our first colors.



Dry on a baking rack, on a paper towel lined baking sheet.



Pull the tape off, add more tape if you want multiple colors with overlapping and dip again! Here are the beauties we came up with.










These two are my favorite :)



Sunday I decided to get out our silver bunnies and alabaster eggs to go on our Easter table. We had Steve, Kelly and Miles over for dinner and I wanted to bring out the china for the occasion.





Dan made a lovely roasted chickens (sorry no photo) with a light sauce of olive oil, lemon juice, orange juice, garlic and herbs instead of gravy.



He also slaved away making funeral potatoes, which are always a family tradition, but with a twist of garlic and rosemary. They were wonderful! And of course no Easter dinner would be complete without rolls. The house was covered in flour as he made Sylvia Butterfield's Oat roll recipe.




Steve and Kelly brought over an excellent asparagus tart and carrot cake cupcakes complete with hand formed marzipan carrots.




I'd never really had carrot cake before so I was pleasantly surprised. I thought it was excellent! Everything really was so good, I was very full.

But what made the day even better was, of course, remembering our Savior Jesus Christ, His sacrifice and the miracle of His resurrection allowing me the opportunity to live with Him and my family for eternity. I loved that LDS General Conference, which happens twice a year, was on Easter. It was a wonderful time to hear from our Prophet and other leaders of our church.