Panorama sugar Easter eggs...

Practically every Easter during my childhood, my mom made my brother, sisters and I a panorama sugar  Easter egg.  Don't know what they are? Click here to get an idea.  The eggs she used to make us were pretty amazing and really elaborate.  They were the horizontal kind. 

Now that my boys are a little bit older and are a bit more interested in the activities that correspond with Easter I decided this would be a good year to try my hand at making one or two sugar eggs for them.

I'm not going to lie, I was pretty nervous making these eggs.  I was scared the sugar wouldn't set right; or that the eggs would break... there's a lot that can go wrong when trying to make these eggs for the first time, ESPECIALLY when you're in a time crunch like I was!  I wanted to have the eggs finished by Easter morning for the boys to enjoy looking in, but I put off making them until the Friday night just before Easter morning!  I needed to get busy, QUICK!

First I had to make my packing mixture from a combination of sugar, confectioners sugar, egg whites and food coloring.

Once I had the packing mixture ready, I packed it into two halves of an egg mold.  This part was pretty fun because it reminded me of when I used to build sand castles as a kid at the beach.

I removed the packed sugar halves from their molds and let them dry for about half an hour on the counter top.  After which, while the outside of the egg half was firm, but the sugar on the inside of the egg was still soft, I proceeded to carefully hollow out each egg half with a spoon.

On a couple of the egg halves I needed to create a window so the boys could look inside the egg, so I chiseled away at the sugar very, very carefully till I had one. 

I got carried away hollowing out one of the egg halves and it broke into pieces!  I had no choice but to start all over again from the first step.

 

When I was done hollowing out the egg halves and making windows in two of the halves, I let the pieces dry overnight.

The following evening, I prepared some grass for the sugar eggs; I used shredded coconut and green food coloring.  After the grass was ready, I used some royal icing to glue it in place into one of the eggs halves.  Then I used some little jelly beans and Easter bunnies and chick figurines that my mom sent me to create an Easter scene.  

Once I was finished decorating the inside of the eggs, I glued two halves of the sugar eggs together with home made royal icing to form one egg.  I let the eggs sit and dry for about an hour.  Once the icing had dried, I piped more royal icing along the edges of the egg's window and seams (I actually did a pretty sloppy job piping the icing; it was super late Saturday evening/early Sunday morning and I was just anxious to finish the project).  After I covered the seams with icing, I used some more royal icing to adhere a few sugar flowers my mom sent me, to decorate the outside of the eggs.

The egg had to sit for another 30 minutes to let all the icing dry and after that it was complete!

I liked the end result. The two eggs were adorable and the boys really liked stealing a peek inside the eggs to see the little bunny with his carrots or the Easter chick with his eggs.  The eggs are completely 100% edible, with the exception of the Easter bunny and Easter chick.  I'm already excited to make more new ones again next year for each of my boys!  I just hope to get better with piping icing before then. (fingers crossed!)