Happy Bulgarian Easter! Yes, it’s today – it’s celebrated at a different time to in the UK and is a very important date in the Orthodox calendar. We have several Bulgarian friends, and every year they bring us the most stunningly painted eggs. The tradition is you bash the top of each others eggs and the intact one is the winner and has a year of good luck. The winning egg is kept until the following year – seriously – I still have mine from last year. You can read more about the tradition here Traditional Bulgarian Easter eggs

Attempt one: we tried dying them with food dye. Epic fail. Very pale and washed out. So for attempt two, we’ve bought proper egg paints, but there’s a slight technical hitch as the instructions are in Bulgarian. And the packet comes with plastic gloves, which is a rather worrying sign for a kids activity. A quick experiment with 3 to 4 drops doesn’t give enough colour intensity, so we decided to use the sachets neat.

Step 1: boil eggs for at least 10 minutes. I put kitchen paper in the bottom of the pan to stop the eggs from cracking.

Step 2: cut up an egg box to make a painting stand.

Step 3: cool eggs.

Step 4: warm the gel sachet paints to soften, if you’re using ones like I bought.

Step 5: dip brushes in the gel sachets and paint directly onto the eggs.

Step 5: use the gold paint as a final decorative layer. Our finished eggs

Now for the competitive side as the siblings attack each others eggs …