Perfect Egg & Soldiers

It’s morning. The kettle is on. Bored of your usual breakfast choices, you start to peruse the cupboards for inspiration. Your eye catches some comical looking egg cups and your head says one thing: “ahhh yeaaah!”

Egg and soldiers (when done properly) will always start your day off brilliantly. Here is a guide to set you up for success. Please note: this is not for the apathetic egg-maker. 

PART 1: Getting started

Ingredients:
2x eggs (drawn on faces optional)
2x slices of bread
Butter (Lurpak or Clover is best)
Salt

Apparatus: 

- 1x pan

1. Place eggs in the pan and fill with water until they are 95% immersed and start to boil. (Optional: add salt to the water so that it “permeates through the shell”).

2. At EXACTLY the moment where the water starts to bubble, start timing FOUR MINUTES. It is absolutely CRUCIAL that your timing is accurate. Put your bread in the toaster at this point as well.

PART 2: The game begins

Treat this stage as a military operation. The eggs have started boiling, the bread is in the toaster. You have approximately 2 minutes to gather together the rest of your apparatus. You can, of course, do this in Part 1, but I enjoy the sense of urgency – it’s what I imagine being on Fun House would have been like.

Apparatus:
1x plate
2x egg cups (ignore jealous comments from house sharers: “why is your plate half covered with toys?!”)
1x butter knife
1x sharp knife
1x tea towel
1x tea spoon
1x egg-remover-from-the-pan tool

The toaster pops. 

3. Grab the toast out of the toaster and wave it around for 30 seconds to aid the cooling down process (cooler toast = more mum-lumps* of butter). 

4. Lavishly butter toast using the butter knife and use the sharp knife to create soldiers (5 per slice). 

5. Place soldiers on plate (by allowing the soldiers to stack slightly in a haphazard fashion, it will give the illusion that you have more soldiers, making the eating experience more enjoyable).

Four minutes should now be up.

6. Turn off heat. Use egg-remover-from-the-pan tool to fish out eggs and place them in the holders. 

7. Use tea towel to hold egg steady and use the sharp knife again to clean-cut the heads off of the eggs. 

Note: People have other methods for “neatly” beheading the eggs, but two points spring to mind here:

                1. It takes too long – the eggs are still cooking whilst you faff around.

                2. They tend to leave shards of shell everywhere: MESSY.

8. Reveal the golden runny eggs that make you fist the air and cry “YES!”  

9. Add lashings of salt.

Enjoy.

* Mum-lumps are the buttery product of motherly carelessness when buttering toast, but they taste amazing.