My grandma yesterday gave me dates and told me: “Alenka, I know you will use them well, in one of your plant-based creations. I just watched on TV how you can make raw “eggs” with dates, nuts and…you will best figure it out yourself!”. It was funny, because a few hours BEFORE this talk, I was telling my mom about this exact idea, which I realised the next day. I used raw ingredients and home-made food colouring that I made out of turmeric, raspberries, matcha, and blueberries.

This easter treasure turned out great!

Ingredients

For about 30 colourful “eggs”:

• dates (115 g)

• hazelnuts (50 g), walnuts (100 g), almonds (100 g) / mix of nuts of your choice (250 g) - they can be ground

• coconut flour (75 g)

• lemon juice (1 tbsp)

• water (2 dl)

Colouring:

• TURMERIC: 1/4 tsp turmeric powder + 2 tbsp water

• MATCHA: 1/2 tsp matcha powder + 2 tbsp water

• RASPBERRIES: 50 g (frozen) raspberries

• BLUEBERRIES: 50 g (frozen) blueberries

Method

First, decide which colours you would like the eggs to be. I used turmeric for yellow, matcha for green, raspberries for pink, and blueberries for purple. I decided to colour each quarter of the mixture with a different colour. For the raspberry and blueberry colouring, take frozen fruits out of the freezer (if they are frozen) and let them defrost at room temperature before you use them.

Cut dates into smaller pieces and soak them in 2 dl of water for about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, grind (if they are not ground yet) the hazelnuts, walnuts, and almonds using a food processor or any other mixer. They should be finely ground - so much that they start to stick together, forming a kind of a paste. You can leave some bigger particles if you want more texture.

*If you have time, you can soak the nuts - hazelnuts and almonds for 8-12 hours and walnuts for about 4-6 hours. You can learn about why it is good to soak (activate) nuts and seeds here.

Put the nuts and the coconut flour in a bowl and mix.

For the date paste, strain the dates AND SAVE the liquid. Put the dates in a food processor, together with 0,25 dl from the dates’ liquid, and mix well - to get an almost uniform, sweet paste. Add it to other ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Add a tablespoon of lemon juice and mix again. And here you have the uncoloured mixture!

COLOURING

Prepare the food colours according to the instructions under the section “ingredients” - in separate bowls, mix: turmeric powder with water, matcha powder with water. For the pink colour mix the raspberries in a blender to get a smooth, pink liquid - do the same with blueberries.

Divide the mixture into four parts and put each part in a different, smaller bowl. 

Add 5 tsp of blueberry colour to one part of the mixture, 6 tsp of raspberry colour to another part, 5 tsp of matcha colour to the third part, and 4 tsp of turmeric colour to the last part of the mixture. Of course, you can adapt the amount to your preference.

Then put all four bowls in a refrigerator for 20 minutes or so - for the mixture to become more firm.

When ready, shape the mixture into whatever you want. For Easter, I created colourful eggs in dimensions of approximately 4 x 3 cm. I put only one colour out of the refrigerator at once and washed my hands before I switched to another colour. I recommend you to do turmeric the last one because it leaves your hands…well…yellow.

And here you have them - colourful Easter eggs or any other shapes you like that will brighten your day. Enjoy!

Possible variations

You can:

• leave a part of the mixture uncoloured

• drizzle the eggs with melted chocolate

• add other food colours

• concentrate the food colours for the more vivid appearance

  …

Bon appetit!