Have You Heard of Baking Eggs Instead of Boiling Them?

I love having hard boiled eggs around, but they can be a pain in the tush to make.  The pot can boil over if the eggs break in there, making a horrible mess to clean up; there is a risk of not getting them done enough; and there is always the chance that I'll forget about them and wind up with smelly, exploded egg on the ceiling (now THAT'S a riot to clean up!).

Then I read about baking whole eggs, in-shell, on-line and gave it a try.  I gotta tell ya- I was nervous.  But amazingly, it worked!  I am certainly not the first person to blog about this, but thought I would pass this on to my readers in case they did not know about it.

Here's how it's done:

Preheat your oven to 350F.

Put an egg into each of either a regular sized or mini muffing tin.  I have two muffin tins that make 12 muffins each, so I can either cook one or two dozen eggs at a time.  (Alternately, you can put the eggs right on the racks in the oven, but if one of the eggs cracks I'd rather clean up a muffin tin than the bottom of my oven.)

Stick the tin in the oven and set the timer for 30 minutes.  (Now you have something screaming at you at the end of the cook time, so you won't forget and boil all the water out of the pot and risk your whole kitchen smell like burnt egg shells.  Nasty!) 

Hang on to your egg cartons- You'll store the cooked eggs in them when they are done.

When the timer goes off, take your eggs out of the oven, but leave them in the tin for 5 minutes at room temp.  They will have little brown spots on them, but don't worry about it:  They will come off in the next step.

In the meantime, fill something with cold water (I just plug up my sink and turn the water on, filling it enough to just cover the eggs).    At the end of 5 minutes, put the eggs into the cold water.  (I use tongs if they are still too hot to handle.)

The muffin tin is usually clean still, so I just put it back in my cabinet.

When the eggs have cooled, put them in the saved egg carton.  Be sure to mark it, so that you know which eggs are hard boiled and which are not in your fridge.  I put an "HB" on the sides of mine with a sharpie so I can see it easily when I open the fridge.

That's it- Perfectly cooked "hard boiled" eggs without the watch-time and potential mess of doing them on the stove.  Yay!