How to prepare farm-fresh eggs for Easter

What's Easter without beautifully decorated eggs? Read on for tips to cook, peel and paint your farm-fresh Easter eggs with ease.

Buying free-range eggs from your local farm is a great way to support local farmers and get the highest quality eggs.

• The ultra-fresh eggs available locally are better in just about every recipe, with one exception: it can be difficult to hard-boil fresh eggs. With Easter coming up, this can be a problem if you're not prepared.

Despite how beautifully they perform in every other recipe, fresh eggs are very difficult to peel when hard boiled.

• The newer the egg, the more likely you are to end up gouging out bits of egg white along with the shell.
• As the egg ages, it "breathes," and as carbon dioxide escapes through the shell, the membrane is less likely to stick to the white part.
• An older egg is much easier to peel cleanly, so it's best to plan ahead for Easter eggs.

1. Buy your carton of eggs two weeks in advance, and store them in the fridge with the lid open to allow the eggs to breathe.
2. Your eggs will stay fresh in the refrigerator, but will ripen to the perfect state for hard boiling.

Hard boiled eggs shouldn't be boiled for very long.

1. Place the eggs in a pot, cover with tap water and bring the water to a boil.
2. Once the water begins to bubble, cover the pot and remove it from the heat so your eggs cook slowly and gently.
3. Many recipes call for this process to last just 10 or 12 minutes, but fresh eggs from free-range chickens tend to have much denser yolks, and these take longer to cook.
4. Keep your farm-fresh eggs in the pot for 20 minutes to get a solid yolk, and don't worry about the whites. This gentle heating method will keep them from getting too rubbery, despite the longer cooking time.

The beauty of getting eggs from a local farmer is that they come in a variety of natural colours, including browns that range from pinkish tan to deep chocolate.

• Araucana chickens lay eggs in varying shades of green and blue. The natural colours are so lovely that you might choose to display your eggs au naturel.

If your children disagree, you can still enjoy the natural beauty of your eggs by using a white paint pen or a non-toxic nail polish pen to draw designs on the eggs.

• This will allow your children to be creative while still highlighting the egg's original colour, and the whole family will get an Easter basket filled with beautiful, natural eggs.