<Authors note> I can't find anything to corroborate that this will actually work.

Making a traditional Easter egg is a wonderful thing.
You make two small holes in the shell, top and bottom, blow out anything edible and you are left with a small oval calcium canvas on which to create a geometric, wax and food coloring masterpiece.
This process has remained unchanged for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, although they may have had a different name for them that far back.
So the notion is to take your empty eggshell and submerge it in a vinegar bath for a very specific but as yet undetermined length of time. Long enough that it has had enough calcium dissolved to be pliable but not long enough to have totally disintegrated. The bath itself to which the vinegar is added, is actually the mold, which when the vinegar is drained and the air is evacuated will cause the shell to warp into the molds' shape for the drying process.
Picture a spiral eggshell, a geodesic oval, or maybe a bunnies’ head shape. Now bake or let air dry until the de-calcified shell holds its shape and remove the mold.

The remainder of the Easter egg coloring experience would remain unchanged but the end result sure wouldn't, why they might even eggspand into other holidays.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Apr 27 2006

sounds like bad chemistry - but .... + for inventive thinking
-- xenzag, Apr 27 2006


I'm not sure this would work--I think the shell is pretty much rigid no matter what, if it was thin it would still crack rather than bending. If you remove the shell entirely, you still have the inner membrane to work with, but then you just get a sort of dried protein thing instead of what you might call an egg.

Maybe if the material of the shell was precipitated back out onto the surface once the molding was done?
-- 5th Earth, Apr 27 2006


Soaking an egg in vinegar doesn't soften the calcium, it dissolves it out. So drying your now rubbery-shelled egg wouldn't make it rigid again.
-- Freefall, Apr 27 2006


Eggxactly.
-- normzone, Apr 27 2006


my dad used to say of chickens - give 'em more grit!

not sure how that helps but he was a mega genius...
-- po, Apr 27 2006


Why take out the egg?
-- jellydoughnut, May 02 2006


'cause scrambled eggs are yummy.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, May 02 2006


Yaaha, but surely if you leave the egg in the shell before you do your whole vinger/mould bath thing, then once the shell has formed it's new shape, you could then boil the egg and then remove the shell, hence an ingenious method for making novelty shaped eggs?
-- daaisy, May 02 2006


The same process is applied with the novelty "egg in a bottle"... um... egg (not the egg-sucking trick, the other one). You soak the egg in vinegar until its shell becomes soft, then squeeze it through the bottleneck, and then pour water over it. Exchange the water regularely for several days, and the shell should re-calcify and become rigid again. And there you have it: an egg inside a bottle. Maybe milk would be even better for recalcifying the eggshell, I don't know. This is the traditional recipe. So your idea might work. [+]
-- Veho, Jan 31 2007



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