Alien Eggs and Cereal (#50)

Our next Film Dining night was probably my favorite one to date. The film was Alien. Early on in this film, the crew awakens from a deep sleep and has breakfast. This was the inspiration of our dinner theme. We had milk and cereal. I had a few varieties, but I asked guests to bring a box of their favorite cereals to share. In addition to cereal, I made eggs. The eggs that I made were very unique though, and I am going to share my secret with you. This is a completely unique recipe that I created on my own and cannot be found online anywhere else.

Xenomorph Alien Eggs

To make these xenomorph eggs, you will need a number of avocados equal to or greater than the number of guests you will be serving. You will need the same number of eggs. In addition, you will need a cupcake or muffin pan and seasoning, preferably cajun.

1. Start by preheating your oven to 350 degrees.

2. Prepare your avocados by cutting off the long end so that each one is relatively eggs shaped aside from the one flat side which will be the bottom of the egg. Do not waste the tops. Scoop out the avocado meat from them and put that filling in a bowl for later.

3. From that open end, use a spoon to gently scoop out the avocado seed from each avocado. Be careful not to damage the exterior of the avocado or to scoop too deep and go through the bottom. I used a plastic spoon when doing this, because it seemed gentler. Any avocado meat that comes out with the seed should be added to the separate bowl from earlier. Do not scoop out any additional avocado once the seed has been removed.

4. Place your hollow avocado "eggs" upside down inside you muffin sheets, so that the hole is facing up. You do not have to grease your pans.

5. Next, prepare your eggs. You will want to mix them as though you are making scrambled eggs. You can mix whole eggs, or you can just do egg whites if you want for a little healthier dish that still has clean flavors. Season the eggs to your particular tastes. I found that cajun spices such as Old Bay worked very well, but anything with a little bit of spice or kick will do. The egg and avocado balance well with those types of flavors. You may do each egg individually or mix and season them all together. Whatever you do, you will need at least one egg per avocado. For extra fun, you can add food coloring to make the egg mixture look even more alien. Green food coloring works particularly well.

6. Gently pour the egg solution into the open hole of each avocado. They should nearly fill the hole. Do not pour it all the way to the edge, but leave just a little space between the top of the egg and the edge of the hole.

7. Now gently put the tray in the oven, being careful not to spill any egg and bake at 350 degrees. I baked mine for 30 minutes. You may decide to do yours differently. The good thing is that because the top is exposed, you can visually see if the egg looks cooked. I will tell you that at 30 minutes, most of mine came out great but just a couple may have been underdone.

8. Once cooked, remove the eggs from the oven. Take out your serving dishes and that bowl of extra avocado that we saved earlier. I suggest serving this in individual bowls. We will be plating each egg by hand. You will also need a sharp knife for this part.

9. Using the spoon from earlier, mix up the extra avocado until it has the consistency of a mush or paste.

10. Once the baked avocados have cooled enough that they can be handled, scoop some of this avocado paste over top the hole of one of the avocados. Do your best to cover the hole completely. It's okay if you use too much, as long as you have enough to do every avocado.

11. Bringing the serving dish to the pan, gently lift the avocado out of the pan, place the dish overtop the hole (like a hat), so that you are holding the dish upside down and then flip it right ways.

12. Set the serving bowl with avocado egg down on the countertop and using your sharp knife, gently cut a large X through the top of the avocado. This creates four flaps that the diner can peel back when eating their "alien egg."

13. Repeat steps 10 through 12 with each egg. Be gentle as you work. Baking the avocado can make the skin delicate and you want it to stay intact.

Xenomorph Alien Eggs are eaten from the top with a spoon and should be treated like a delicacy.

The xenomorph eggs were not the only unique thing that I made for this event though. Our Film Dining event fell just one month shy of the movie's 40th anniversary, so I also made an Alien birthday cake. My cake signified not only the 40th birthday of the film, but also the literal birth of the alien that occurs within the movie. Since the birthing scene is a bit horrifying, it was important to me that the cake reflect that as well. I made a watermelon cake, using real watermelon as well as jello mix. I had found a recipe online that used jello packets to make flavored cake and decided to do that here, with some slight alterations. I picked watermelon for two reason. For starters, it was red, which matched the gore feeling that I was looking for, but mainly, I wanted to use watermelon so that I could carve the cake topper out of it.

Using a fresh watermelon half (because I didn't need a whole watermelon), I did my best to carve something resembling the baby chest-bursting alien that appears in the film. I didn't do a lot of detail, just focused on the mouth and eyes. I gave it a longer body than I needed, because I was going to have it burst out of the cake rather than setting on it. Once carved, I refrigerated that piece. I then cut several thin strips of watermelon from what was left over and dehydrated them. When making the cake batter, I added a bit of dehydrated chunks of watermelon to the batter. It's important that the moisture was removed from the watermelon first or the cake's consistency would have been affected. I didn't use all of my watermelon. Some of the dehydrated bits I saved later. I ended up making two sheet cakes because of the number of guests that I was expecting.

Once baked and frosted with a white frosting, I proceeded to decorate them. For the main cake, I cut a hole out of the center just large enough for my alien cake topper to burst out of. Sprinkled around the hole, I put chunks of dehydrated watermelon, because they look a bit like pieces of flesh. Using corn syrup and red food coloring, I made fake blood, which I dripped all over the alien and splattered onto the cake itself.

For the other cake, I just wrote Happy Birthday Alien with red icing and used red food coloring to dye sprinkles which I placed around the border. Both cakes were a big hit, and they tasted delicious.