Dinosaur eggs are a fun idea for a kids birthday party! They are really easy to make, and kids love to dig their little hands into the dinosaur egg to find the hidden treasure inside! We have a few jr. palaeontologists here at The Dinoverse, so of course I had to make dinosaur eggs!
I used two different diy recipes to see which one would work the best for our dinosaur egg party. Both of them use coffee grounds, salt and flour, so easy ingredients to find! The second recipe calls for sand, so I used purple craft sand. Of course dinosaurs and other little fossil treasure ideas for the kids to dig out are needed. It was super fun making these diy dinosaur eggs!
If you are like me, you brewed your morning coffee and then instead of putting the grounds in the compost, you saved them. If you aren’t a coffee drinker, or don’t have a coffee drinker in the house, that’s ok! Brew the coffee a few hours before you want to get started so both the grounds and the coffee have a chance to cool down before you use them. Get out a baking tray and line it with parchment paper. Then, when it’s time to start, get your hands in there! Mix everything together! It’s quite a fun sensory experience. We used pink craft sand that I bought at the dollar store, and it gave our Dinosaur eggs a lovely pinky-purple color! No one really knows exactly what color Dinosaur eggs really were, right?
One recommendation; don’t add all the liquid at once. We found that recipe 1 with the sand was REALLY hard to work with when all the water was added. We ended up adding more salt, sand, flour and coffee grounds just to be able to cover our little dinos. Recipe 2, however, needed more coffee! It was quite dry; that could have been because my grounds were a couple days old, and quite dry.
Once it’s all mixed up, start forming your Dinosaur eggs! Put a little mix into your hand. Place your tiny dino treasure in the center, and then cover it with more mix. Form it a bit to make sure the dino is hidden well, and then place it on your baking tray.
Once all your Dinosaur eggs are made, you have 2 options. You can bake your dinosaur eggs in the oven at 200° , or just leave them out for about a week to dry. We baked ours for about 45 min in the oven. They came out firm and holding together nicely, but still fairly soft. We decided to let them sit a few days, to see if they would dry out some more.
Recipe #1: With the Sand
This one turned out much softer overall and so would be the one to go for if you are making them for younger kids or toddlers. Our preschool Jr Palaeontologist had an easy time cracking into this one, and the look of awe and surprise when she saw the plastic dinosaur in the middle was awesome! The dough for this recipe was much harder to work with, and the dinosaur eggs didn’t look much like a traditional egg shape, but is that really the most important thing when you have a chance to excavate your own dinosaur?
Recipe #2: With Coffee
This one was much more difficult to get into. After baking for 45 min, and then drying out on the counter for a week, our Jr Palaeontologists had to use metal instruments to get into them. Thank goodness our assistants had a chisel and hammer close by! The bright side of that is it was a much more realistic experience for the older kids. They got to chip away for a bit, rather than cracking the egg right away. It took a bit more effort, and therefore the DInosaur reward was that much more egg-citing for them! This recipe was much easier to work with when making the eggs too, and a bit more egg-looking. It would be a great one for an older kids birthday party, as long as you had enough supervision for the tools (or maybe didn’t let them dry for quite as long)
Overall, this was a really fun activity. All our Jr Palaeontologists had a great time, excavating their dinosaur treasure from the eggs. We will definitely be doing this for a Dinosaur birthday party in the future. I highly recommend you give it a try if you have anyone who loves dinosaurs in your world! If you want to be notified when we have more exciting dinosaur activities on our blog, follow us on Instagram! And don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter to have Tatum, the Tyrannosaurus send you fun dinosaur stuff! You’ll even get a discount in The Dinoverse shop!
