Easter Eggs / Ostereier / Paskalya yumurtası

It's Eastertime! Every year, I make Easter eggs and every year I try to make them with a different technique. These are this year's products. I coloured them by cooking them together with red-onion leaves and some grated carrots. That's how they got their "suntan". Colouring the eggs this way is an ancient technique in Slovenia. You can get different colours by cooking different vegetables together with the eggs: red beetroot colours the eggs pink, red onions brown, carrots orange.

However, before cooking the eggs, I put on as many rubber bands on each egg as I could - and into the boiling water they went! That's how the stripes were created. It would be even better if I had wider rubber bands, but I quite like them the way they are.

And, to add the final touch, I polished each egg with a cloth dipped in salad oil - this gave the Easter eggs their shine. Instead of salad oil you can also use a thin piece of bacon and rub the eggs in it (for all those bacon-lovers out there - don't worry, the bacon is not wasted: you can eat it afterwards, because the colouring of the eggs is natural and "sterile" after boiling the eggs for a quarter of an hour). How do you like the design? :-)