MOSES LAKE - To all the kids who will be scrambling around McCosh Park Saturday, it might seem like all those brightly colored Easter eggs appeared in the park by magic. Of course it's not magic, it's all the work of the Easter Bunny. But he's got a lot of places to be that weekend and sometimes he needs help.

In Moses Lake he gets that help from the culinary students at the Columbia Basin Job Corps.

The culinary students have been in charge of boiling and coloring eggs for three or four years, said instructor Theresa Clement. The Easter Bunny and his helpers at the Moses Lake Lions Club, who sponsor the annual Easter egg hunt, got into a bind. Lions volunteers couldn't provide the eggs any more, and they were looking for some help.

That was when the Job Corps students stepped in. "Truly, if we didn't do it (color the eggs) they wouldn't be able to do it," Clement said.

She estimated the students will dye about 5,400 eggs in 2013. "That's a lot of eggs," Clement said.

Indeed it is, and getting that many eggs boiled and colored is a job in itself. "You've got to start from ground zero," Clements said, dumping the raw eggs in cold water. (For non-cooks, that keeps the eggs from cracking, she said.) Boiling so many eggs requires every burner in the spacious Job Corps kitchen, as well as the special cooker.

The eggs boil for 10 minutes, then are plunged into an ice water bath for 10 minutes.

After that it's off to the color baths, and for 2013 there are "six colors," said Vanessa Winchester. A fellow student started to take inventory - blue, turquoise, red, yellow, orange, green, pastel yellow, pink, light blue and light green.

With the multi-gallon cooker, "we can knock it out in three days." The eggs are cooked, cooled and colored, and "we put them on the trays we sort them by color, and we keep going," Winchester said.

Michael Bricker was removing eggs from the ice water "Aaah, cold," he said. "The bigger it is, the more of a challenge," he said. "The challenge is what's fun."

It's a big job but it's easier than those meals where the crew is under time pressure, Winchester said. "It's actually more fun than work. Just having a good time with the crew," she said.