Bring A Pop Of Color To Easter With Dyed Marshmallows Instead Of Eggs

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There are dozens of reasons why a person might want to skip the eggs in lieu of other items when decorating for Easter. Marshmallows, for example, are more gastronomically aligned with a holiday whose other foodstuffs include chocolate bunnies, sugar-cloaked chicks, and other classic American Easter candy favorites, than the Cobb salad staple. Barring any extraordinary circumstances, they're also probably going to be cheaper, and which would you rather have accidentally hidden in your home for weeks or more? Last one to the dyed marshmallow is a rotten egg, indeed.

The first thing you might imagine when conceptualizing just how this is going to work is another recent seasonal staple, hot chocolate. Yes, a big pouf of a marshmallow will begin to dissolve into a sticky cloud before too long when cocoa is in play, but that is due to the high temperature and duration of the immersion, not simply because of the liquid per se. You should still skip the three-ingredient homemade marshmallow variety in this case, as it is quicker to break down, but store bought will perform terrifically. Just add enough drops of food coloring to reach your desired intensity to water, dunk each marshmallow for 10 seconds or so, and remove to a wire rack to dry. There are plenty of other ways to introduce festive hues, too.

Skip the iconic, vinegar-forward kits if you plan to eat the marshmallows later in lieu of the simpler water and food coloring concoction or take a totally different decorative route. Food coloring pens like this set from Edibleink allow for even greater control and design possibilities. Some come with such a fine tip that you can even adorn the marshmallows with little panoramic Easter scenes, or just create more precisely outlined stripes or polka dots. You can, of course, always combine these two coloring mechanisms, but you'll want to make sure that any first round of dye has fully dried before you attempt to draw on anything else.

If you aren't afraid of a little glitter, you can also add a bit of edible sparkle after you've applied a thin layer of something a little tacky like simple syrup, which you can easily make at home, to the marshmallow's surface. Or layer on some gold leaf in similar fashion to really approximate the goose, or rather the bunny of dubious biology, that laid the golden egg.