How to Make a Heart-Shaped Egg

Don’t you think all food should be heart-shaped? Yeah, me too. I’m slowly working my way down the list. To my usuals (heart-shaped meatloaf, mashed potatoes, muffins, cupcakes, donuts and cookies), I’m adding one more: heart-shaped eggs. I think they’re my favorite.

You don’t need much. Here’s the very short list:

Heart-shaped Eggs

• eggs, hard-boiled and still very warm
• cardboard (milk cartons work great)
• rubber bands, 2 per egg
• knitting needle or chopstick, 1 per egg

Multi-tasker that I am, I tried making three of these at once, but it didn’t turn out very well, because the pressure of the knitting needle split two of the eggs. It may have worked to do two at a time, but I just went back to my tried-and-true, one-at-a-time method. So you can experiment and see if you get different results, but I recommend taking your time and doing one per cardboard.

So about the cardboard … I’ve tried milk cartons, cake boxes, and just plain old scrap cardboard that made its way into our recycling. The milk carton is probably the best, because the waxy inside keeps the moisture from the egg from softening the cardboard. But whatever you choose, it should be about this big:

Using a sharp knife, score the wrong side of the cardboard so it will bend in half nicely, like this:

(Just in case you haven’t “scored” anything lately, all you do is lay a straight edge in the center of the cardboard — I used the side of my cake pan, because that’s what I had handy — and run the knife along the edge so that you’re cutting into the cardboard but not all the way through it. Then bend the cardboard away from you.)

Now peel your still-very-warm egg, dry, and set inside the cardboard “V.” Take your bending implement (I usually see these made with chopsticks, but I have way more knitting needles around the house than chopsticks, so that’s what I use) and set it along the top of the egg and secure both ends with rubber bands. Be careful not to split the egg while doing all this.

Here’s another angle … not that it gives any more or better info. It DOES show you how impatient I was to get this egg peeled. See that rough spot on the end? Sigh.

And … THAT’S IT!! Just leave it to cool for about 10-15 minutes, and there you go.

Here’s what this one looked like when I cut it in half:

And here are pictures of the eggs that split when I did three at a time. I just cut off the split part and went with it. Doing three at a time yielded a more rounded bottom, so I’m going to stick with one at a time and probably use my egg slicer to make several heart-shaped slices out of each. More mileage for your money 🙂

And the good news is, you’ve got exactly 100 days to practice before Valentine’s Day! 🙂