Little Explorers: Dinosaur Eggs

There’s nothing wrong with an Easter egg hunt, but they’re over so quickly, aren’t they? And then the children nearly always get upset because someone else won more eggs than them. We decided to give the Little Explorers a daring alternative to hunt for - dinosaur eggs! They’re easy to make and great fun to dig up and smash open.

All you need are used coffee grounds, flour, salt, water and something to hide inside the eggs. We hid foil-wrapped chocolate eggs and mini dinosaur toys in ours. After extensive research of coffee shops (all for the Little Explorers’ benefit, of course!) we found the one with the mermaid logo to be the most helpful in giving away used grounds.

The recipe is simple. Mix one cup of coffee grounds, two cups of flour, one cup of salt and one cup of water to make a cement mix mush. It’s up to you whether you ask your Little Explorers to be involved in the making of the eggs. If they get involved at this stage, they won’t have the surprise of finding what’s inside. But at least their friends can enjoy the big reveal! And it is enormous fun to mix and mush the dinosaur dough then mould it around the present.

We made a great big batch of this concoction, then shaped it into rough dinosaur egg shapes with the eggs and toys hidden inside. If it had been warm sunshine outside, we’d have left the eggs to dry over a few days in the garden. However, as we’re all still enduring a chilly March, we baked them slowly in the oven at around 140 degrees to dry out until the outer shell was hard. It took about 1.5 hours.

The grown-ups then buried them all over the garden. We togged up the kids as micro explorers, all set with magnifying glasses, bug boxes and tools for smashing into the eggs! They were quite hard to see being mud-coloured, so it took a good amount of searching to find them. The great thing about the chocolate not being on display was that no-one snaffled a few in secret before the big haul was collected.

We piled up all the eggs, then asked the Little Explorers to choose a tool each to smash and bash their way through the shells to the treasure within! It took serious determination with some of the over-baked ones, and we admired how creatively the children solved the problem. Some found toy dinos, others found chocolate eggs, everyone was happy!

Expert Explorers: Did you know that the first dinosaur egg found was mistakenly identified as a giant bird egg? It’s now known that birds are modern, feathered, dinosaurs. The oldest known dinosaur eggs and embryos are from Massospondylus, which lived during the Early Jurassic, about 190 million years ago.