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Blowing an egg for Easter
13 April 2017 03:31 amWho would have thought that it would take most of an hour to blow an egg? It's the hardest I've ever had to blow -- worse than playing the shawm, which was the previous occasion on which I was seriously concerned that my eyes seemed to be bulging out of their sockets with the back-pressure!
No doubt I didn't make the holes large enough, although I used the biggest darning-needle I could find and when I tried to enlarge them further they threatened to crack dangerously. But everything I read talked about the difficulty of breaking up the yolk in order to get it out -- my problems were always with the white, which proved gelatinous at best and all too often emerged in solid white chunks which bunged up the hole and had to be fished out with the needle-point. Once I actually got to the yolk, relatively late on in the proceedings, it was quite liquid and came out in a thin stream rather than a bulging lump.
Then trying to open up the holes enough to actually let the tap-water in to rinse out the shell (they kept closing over as the internal membrane of the egg flapped back into position) was almost impossible. I managed to get enough in to blow a thin jet out again under pressure, and when this ran clear I gave up and stuck the egg in the oven to leave it there overnight in an attempt to dry it out inside. It still smelt eggy when I sniffed the hole :-(
Whatever remains in the morning should at least be dried-on egg rather than raw egg, which is probably less likely to go off in a hurry once decorated.... I did have ideas of doing two eggs in different designs, but I am definitely not going through all that again!
No doubt I didn't make the holes large enough, although I used the biggest darning-needle I could find and when I tried to enlarge them further they threatened to crack dangerously. But everything I read talked about the difficulty of breaking up the yolk in order to get it out -- my problems were always with the white, which proved gelatinous at best and all too often emerged in solid white chunks which bunged up the hole and had to be fished out with the needle-point. Once I actually got to the yolk, relatively late on in the proceedings, it was quite liquid and came out in a thin stream rather than a bulging lump.
Then trying to open up the holes enough to actually let the tap-water in to rinse out the shell (they kept closing over as the internal membrane of the egg flapped back into position) was almost impossible. I managed to get enough in to blow a thin jet out again under pressure, and when this ran clear I gave up and stuck the egg in the oven to leave it there overnight in an attempt to dry it out inside. It still smelt eggy when I sniffed the hole :-(
Whatever remains in the morning should at least be dried-on egg rather than raw egg, which is probably less likely to go off in a hurry once decorated.... I did have ideas of doing two eggs in different designs, but I am definitely not going through all that again!
