Wanna explode your kids’ minds?
‘Course you do.
Take a dozen extra-large eggs, poke a dime-sized hole in one end of each one, and drain ’em into two bowls—one for the cake recipe of your choice, and one for whatever recipes you have that call for a lot of eggs.
It will be a disgusting, yet fascinating process that you may want to share with any spare kids or sisters-in-law you may have around.
Drinking hot tea from a Wonder Woman mug is recommended, but not required.
Once the eggshells are emptied, rinse them out with water, drain them, swish a few drops of oil inside, drain them, and let them rest a bit while you help your eleven-year old wrestle the egg beaters into the hand mixer so she can make up the cake batter of your choice.
Meanwhile, ask any other bored kids you might have hanging around to make little foil eggshell nests in a muffin tin.
Grab a roll of paper towels. You will need them.
Fill the eggshells halfway to barely two-thirds. Many recipes will tell you three-fourths . . . They lie.*
Or use a much denser cake that we did.
Whatever.
Surface tension is NOT our friend.
A strong light can be very helpful in figuring out how full your shells are.
Portrait of an overfull egg.
Wipe of any spilled batter and put the filled shells into their nests.
Stick ’em in the oven at whatever temperature the cake batter needs for a few minutes shy of whatever the cupcake time for the batter might be.
Ready!
Have your kids help with clean up.
When the timer dings, pull out the tin and realize we weren’t kidding about overfilling the shells. Let them cool a bit, which they will do pretty quickly.
Snuffleupageggs!
Peel the excess cake from the shells—GENTLY—and use a damp paper towel and a clean fingernail to scrub/scrape off any clinging crumbs.
Your kids will help with the disposal of the discarded cake pieces. Like you could stop them.
Grab another roll of paper towels. Trust me.
Take a tub of the icing of your choice. Add a little food coloring if you want.
If you have a pastry injector, that’s great. If not, perhaps you also had a local pharmacist who handed out a lot of extra meds dispensers with each of the stunning number of Amoxicillin prescriptions your kids may have racked up over the years.
So. Many. Possibilities.
Regardless, fill the injector/dispenser with icing and squirt a couple of cc’s deep into each egg. See why you made the holes so big?
They will not be pretty because this is your first time doing this, but turn ’em over and no one will know.
Until they pick ’em up and their eyes go big because “Is that what you were doing all afternoon?”
Yes. Yes it was.
Clean up the kitchen. You’re probably on your own here, but it you really minded, you wouldn’t have started all this in the first place, right?
So . . . are these things really worth the hassle and the mess?
Let’s go to the judges:
Fun!
Cute!
Yum!
Oh, yeah.
________________________
*Use the leftover batter for more conventional cupcakes. Even with all the stuff you’ll waste getting the batter into the eggshells, you should have enough left for about eight . . . or four really big ones.
Earful of Cider 