Week 14 – The One With Huevos de Diablo!

Week 14 fell the week before Easter, and this Pinventure was accomplished in advance of my brother’s annual Big Backyard Easter Egg Hunt and potluck dinner – an afternoon of child wrangling, furious egg collecting, melted chocolate, Icy Pops, a fabulous giant bunny suit, beer, and all-around good times. It has become a tradition for my little family to bring deviled eggs to this event, something I’m all too happy to continue. The Guy I Married could survive exclusively on deviled eggs for the rest of his life, and aside from his recipe being pretty dang scrumptious, he actually enjoys making them by himself.

Well, for the most part. He enjoys chopping them in half after they’re boiled, making the yolk mix, filling them, and taste testing a healthy amount. He hates boiling them and peeling them.

Who likes peeling hard boiled eggs, really? Nobody. No matter how perfect your technique, when boiling and peeling mass quantities there will always be mangled casualties, shells will stab you under your fingernails, and you will likely scald off your fingertips because you jumped the gun and tried to peel the little orbs before they were good and cool.

I have accepted that no egg peel will ever be perfect, but if you want to simplify the boiling process to save yourself a lot of fretting and stovetop-stalking, you’re going to flip over this:

baking hard boiled eggs by The Burlap Bag, click through for the Pin and the link

Bake the eggs. Bake the friggin’ eggs! Don’t waste a big pot of water or fuss over timing or wait quite as long for them to cool! It’s so stupid easy and I am in as much awe as Lauren from The Burlap Bag was. I even wrote a song about it:

Put those eggies in the oven
Put those eggies in the oven
Put those eggies in the oven
Bake ’em in the whole shell
Oven power!

I may or may not have sung that to the tune of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song while gleefully filling our mini muffin pan with eggs.

ready for baking

It really is as easy as it sounds: put the eggs in the oven and bake them at 325 for 30 minutes. This suggested time and temperature ended up being perfect for the single test egg AND for the 20 eggs we made for the gathering. We waited about 15 minutes before we started to peel them, and there was no difference in the peeling process -it was still as hit and miss as ever.

The only problem? Some of the eggs got a tad too hot from resting against the metal of the muffin pan and ended up slightly burned. Not to worry – they made fine taste testers for our three-person quality control department.

a happy bunny plate of yumminess

Moral of the Tutorial – I am never boiling eggs the conventional way ever again. Ever. Viva la oven!

Bunny, meet Squirrel

Here’s a little peek at our Easter. The fabulous giant bunny suit came out of retirement this year, both because there are now littler ones to appreciate (or scream at) it, and there is someone in the family who finally fits into it. The man behind the mask follows in the footsteps of my oldest brother, younger brother, and one scruffy ex-boyfriend – he’s my sister-in-law’s nephew, and he was a very good sport for a 16-year-old, tromping around in that sweaty thing for a good 30 minutes, giving high fives and taking pictures. I’m happy that Squirrel wasn’t afraid of him.

Moving right along and now only four weeks behind on my Pinventure blogging. Woo hoo! Thanks for being patient with me!