April fool's day egg-cellent brownies

Yummy note: I wanted a fun treat to take to a recent playdate for the kids and with April and Easter right around the corner, I made up a batch of these adorable brownie eggs for them. I thought the girls would get a kick out of them, especially since my kiddo hates hard boiled eggs. I get the "yuck" look everytime, so why not play an April Fool's joke on her and say her treat is a hard boiled egg, rather than a sweet treat!

Egg-cellent Brownies

Ingredients:

7 ounces chocolate, chopped
1 stick butter (1/2 cup), cut into 8 pieces
3 eggs

1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

Pinch of salt

1 cup flour

3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

1 teaspoon vanilla
prepared empty egg shells, as directed below

couple tablespoons vegetable oil

Directions:

To prepare the empty egg shells: The prepared egg shells need to be done atleast 30 minutes prior to baking, so allow extra time for that. I carefully poked a small hole at the top of the egg shells using a wine bottle opener. Then I took a wood skewer and broke up the yolk to be able to shake out the rest of the egg into a bowl. While doing this part, the small opening at the top of the egg became a bit bigger, lol. Time and patience, or perhaps a steady hand is needed for this. :) Emptied egg shells are then rinsed and dunked into a bowl of salt water for about 30 minutes to soak. Once you soak them, drain the water out of the eggs and let them dry. Last step in preparing the eggs, is you want to pour in some vegetable oil into each shell and gently swirl it around to coat. The original recipes calls to do about 12 eggs, however, I only had the patience and time with the kiddos to do about a half dozen! So I poured the rest of the batter in one of my smaller shaped silicon pans and baked the leftovers that way! :)

To make the brownie batter: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Melt chocolate and butter in a double boiler like I did, or in the microwave. Stir until melted and smooth, then allow chocolate to cool a bit. Then whisk together eggs and sugar. Add in vanilla and warm chocolate. Mix ingredients well before adding in your flour, salt, and cocoa powder. Stir until just combined. Then pour batter into a baggie and cut off an end to be able to pipe into the eggs. Pipe in batter into empty egg shells, until the eggs are about ¾ full. Place eggs into a muffin tin, that has a layer of crinkled up aluminum foil on the bottom, to hold the eggs in place while they bake. Bake for about 15 minutes or until brownies are done and cool. I would guess you could color the eggs shells before, but honestly it was more of an after thought for me, so I did it at the end. To make the dye, I just used like a cup of boiling water, a splash of vinegar, and a couple drops of food coloring in a cup and dunked the eggs in to pretty up the eggs.



Thanks to the bloggers from these sites from which I saw the idea originally:

Erin at http://makingmemorieswithyourkids.blogspot.com/2012/03/secret-recipe-club-egg-shaped-brownies.html

and Liz at http://thatskinnychickcanbake.blogspot.com/2011/11/egg-shaped-brownies.html and http://www.larecetadelafelicidad.com/2011/11/brownie.html