TwentyTen: Separate Date from Author in twentyten_posted_on function

Hello!

My blog’s URL is: https://www.iceybooks.com/blog
Ideally, I would like to extract the entry-date from the entry-meta (which houses the date and posted-by), but I’m not sure how to do that.

In loop.php, I have this:
<div class=”entry-meta”>
<?php twentyten_posted_on(); ?>
</div><!– .entry-meta –>

In functions.php, I have this:
if ( ! function_exists( ‘twentyten_posted_on’ ) ) :
/**
* Prints HTML with meta information for the current post-date/time and author.
*
* @since Twenty Ten 1.0
*/

function twentyten_posted_on() {
printf( __( ‘%2$s <span class=”posted-by”>Posted by %3$s</span>’, ‘twentyten’ ),
‘meta-prep meta-prep-author’,
sprintf( ‘<span class=”entry-date”>%3$s</span>‘,
get_permalink(),
esc_attr( get_the_time() ),
‘<time class=”month”>’ . get_the_date(‘M’) . ‘</time>
<time class=”day”>’ . get_the_date(‘d’) . ‘</time>
<time class=”year”>’ . get_the_date(‘Y’) . ‘</time>’
),

sprintf( ‘<span class=”author vcard”>%3$s</span>’,
get_author_posts_url( get_the_author_meta( ‘ID’ ) ),
esc_attr( sprintf( __( ‘View all posts by %s’, ‘twentyten’ ), get_the_author() ) ),
get_the_author()
)
);
}

endif;

What I’d like to do, is extract the date from this and give it it’s own function, so I can close it in a <div> and move it into the posthead.

Any idea how to do this? Thank you in advance!