Kitchen Science

While we were cooking eggs, the Hawk said he needed a glass of vinegar and proceeded to put an egg in it. He'd seen this experiment on Backyard Science and wanted to recreate it himself. The acid in the vinegar (acetic acid) reacts with the calcium carbonate in the egg shell, releasing carbon dioxide and making the shell soft once the carbon is gone.





The Firecat was not to be left out of course, so we had two eggs bubbling away in the vinegar.





After a day, Hawk gave bouncing the soft egg a try like he had seen on Backyard Science, so far so good.



But they discovered the soft egg didn't bounce so well from a higher drop! This did not go down well with the Firecat! Apparently you can get the eggshell to return to normal if you leave it out in the air (it takes in carbon from the air) or you can get it to explode by putting it in water. Our eggs didn't last long enough to try either of those! There was some consolation in this heart shaped yolk though!

Puffy Paint

I found the recipe for puffy paint on pinterest, 1 cup of self raising flour, 1 cup of salt, 1 cup of water and food colour. Mix it all together so that it is a paste like consistency. We veered from the recipe a little for a couple of reasons, first because we didn't have enough salt left for a cup and second because a 3 year old was in charge of the whole thing and her measuring may have been "slightly" out!



She did the mixing straight into the squeeze bottles rather than transferring it from a bowl.



I thought she was all good to go in her smock but she still managed to get lots of paint on her clothes! It did wash out luckily. Once the paintings were done, we cooked them in the microwave in 3 x 10 second bursts, getting the puffy look.