One of my latest Walmart Mom challenges was to make something “DIY” for Easter.  I decided to try something completely new–making a sugar egg! Are you familiar with these? It’s like a little Easter diorama inside of an egg made out of sugar.

I remember one year when I was a child my mom had one of these (store bought).  I thought it was so amazing to peer inside and see a little world!  I was determined to stretch my limits and try making one of my own!

Tutorial: Sugar Egg Diorama for Easter

Materials:

3 1/2 C Sugar
1/2 C Powdered Sugar
1 Egg White
Egg shaped mold
Food coloring
Royal Icing, Icing bags & tips, Coconut, candies etc for decorations.

Instructions:

In a large mixing bowl combine the two sugars.

In a separate bowl whip the egg white until foamy.  Add your food coloring to the egg white.  Remember-the white sugar will reduce the vibrancy of the food color a lot-so make it darker than you think you need it.

Pour the egg into the sugar and start mixing.  At first it will just clump up-you must persevere.

And keep on mixing and mixing. . .

Until your mixture becomes the consistency of damp sand.

Now for your mold.  I looked online for “egg molds” and not only did they look dumb, but they weren’t cheap.  Instead I headed out to the Easter Aisle at Walmart and found this cute egg.  It started out packed with candy and cost about $3.  The kids were more than happy to help me “empty” it 🙂

Pack your sugar mixture TIGHTLY into your mold and level it off with a butter knife.

Now invert the molded sugar onto a piece of cardboard.

At this point you need to let the sugar dry enough to make a “shell” that you can handle without drying all the way through . .because you need to scoop the guts out!  If you have time let it air dry for an hour or two.  If, like me, you left things a bit late and are in a rush you can use a low oven to hurry the process along.

I put my two egg halves in a 200 oven for about 30 minutes.

Take them out and un-mold them.  Now it’s time to start carefully scraping out the guts.  The center of the egg is still soft-but the flat bottom probably has dried along with the outside.  I carefully scraped and poked till I got a piece out, then I used the spoon to sort of crack off the “crust”.  Once I had that off the inside scraped out very easily.

When you’ve got both shells scooped out you still need some way to see into the egg.  My mold had a flat spot on one side, so that was going to be my “peeper”.  I used a steak knife and very very carefully “drilled” a hole.

Then I drilled another hole about a half inch away. I used the knife to saw in between the two, then carefully sawed/chipped around the edges until my opening was the size I wanted it.  Yay!

Now comes the fun of decorating.  First I decided I needed some “grass” so I dyed some coconut green.

Next I made up some Royal Icing (which turns hard when dry).  It just takes powdered sugar, meringue powder and a tiny bit of water.  I used the Wilton Royal Icing Recipe.

I decided I wanted a bunny in my egg. I Google “bunny silhouette”.  I found a good free for use one at a site called The Quilling Patch.  I copied it in a couple of sizes onto a piece of paper.  Then I put wax paper over it and used white royal icing to “trace” over a couple of the silhouette.

Now I thinned out a bit of the royal icing and dyed it blue.

Then with a regular craft paintbrush I painted the inside of the egg a nice sky blue!

A few finishing touches-an icing cloud or two, eyes & nose for the bunny, gluing the grass in with more icing. . .

Then I ran some icing around the edges and glued the two egg halves together.

To finish off the egg you run a nice icing edge along the seam and around the window looking in.  If you haven’t, oh, lets say left the entire project until the morning you are leaving on a weekend trip or anything, well then you can take your time and make it look really pretty-maybe adding little flowers and decorations all over the outside in various colors.  Or you can do like I did and just use the white and let it go

The finished project!

Now there are many other ways you can decorate one of these eggs.  You could use any color for the egg itself-like purple or pink perhaps. Of course you can really snazz up the outside of the egg with flowers, designs or curly cues 🙂

Instead of making your own royal icing decorations for the inside you could use little toys, buy some of those hard, premade “cake decorations” or even just print things out on paper to insert inside.  Your only limit is your imagination!

Have any of you ever made sugar eggs?  I’d love to hear about yours.

Disclosure: This post is part of a campaign I am participating in with the Walmart Moms. Walmart has provided me with compensation and product for this post. My participation is voluntary and opinions, as always are my own. 
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