Decorating empty egg shells is the perfect Easter holiday activity for your little ones. Once you know how to prepare the eggs, the only limit is your child’s imagination. Plus, you can make an omelette for lunch afterwards with the leftover unused egg yolks.


You will need:

Fresh eggs in an egg box

A safety pin

A toothpick

A straw

A measuring jug or bowl

Pens and other art materials to decorate

Method:

1. Sit an egg in your egg box to steady it. Holding the egg still, carefully tap and push a hole in the top centre of the egg with your safety pin. Once you have made the hole, carefully push one end of the pin in as far as it will go to widen it.

2. Take the toothpick and insert it into the hole; stir it around to help break up the yolk and make it easier to remove the insides at step 4.

3. Flip the egg over and make a second hole on the opposite side with your pin. Try to make the hole on the bottom a little bigger but be careful not to crack the shell. Break up the yolk again with your toothpick.

4. Hold the egg over a measuring jug with the bigger hole facing down. Use a straw to flush out the contents of the egg by placing the tip of the straw over the hole and blowing hard. First the egg white will come out, followed by the yolk – it can take a minute to get going, so be patient. You will know that it’s all out when it becomes lighter and you are just blowing out bubbles of egg white, followed by air.

5. Clean the shell by holding it carefully under running hot water from the kitchen tap. Wipe carefully with kitchen paper and leave to dry. Now you’re ready to decorate with paint, pens, stickers, felt, glitter or whatever else takes your fancy.

6. We created written hashtag designs with permanent markers, like ‘fresh’, ‘goodegg’ and ‘dippy’, plus an Easter chick using yellow, orange and black coloured markers and the snipped-off tied end of a red balloon for its crest (we poked the bit of the balloon into the hole on the egg top).

Our little flower girl design was just a sprig of thyme snipped from the garden and secured at the back with a little bit of tape.

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If you want to paint your shells, you will need to cover them in a few layers of tissue paper and glue first like paper mache before leaving to dry and painting – but coloured permanent marker pens are a quicker alternative to painting and give a good, neat result.

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Have you ever made decorated Easter eggs? We’d love to hear your creative ideas…