(Un)easy bake
Oh this brings back memories....
Easy Bake toy ovens recalled for second time this year
WASHINGTON --The Easy Bake oven, an iconic toy with a four-decade history, has been recalled for the second time in less than a year, government safety advocates announced on Thursday.
In February Easy Bake's parent company, Hasbro Inc., recalled 985,000 of the toys because children were getting their hands and fingers trapped in the front opening, and some were burned.
I had some such toy as a child. I think it was a Betty Crocker Easy-Bake Oven.
My nineteen seventy something model cooked
the...er... food with light bulbs as opposed to the plutonium which is apparently used as a heating source in the modern versions of the oven. (Actually, it's an "electric heating element" - ultimately a lightbulb could be called an electric heating element too but this is a matter of deeper semantics than is justified here I think)
As they do now, my oven came with cake mix packets. I recall they tasted a bit fucked up, as if sweet plastic were a key ingredient. But we mixed them all up anyhow (I believe they were all of the "just add water!" variety).
Then we ran out of mixes. So my sister and I experimented with our own mixes. No clue where the 'rents were for this fiasco. Absorbed in some martini fueled drama no doubt (these were the gin years).
It must have been winter since although I think we started when there was still light coming in from the kitchen windows, I have this sense it got dark fast and early. Most of my memory of the easy bake disaster took place in an increasingly dark kitchen. By the time we put the cakes in the oven, the only light in the room, in fact the only light on that floor of our house, was what seeped out of the little "smoked glass"-like plastic windowed casing enclosing the super hot 60 watt bulbs - which were slowly cooking our itty bitty cakes.
I recall the cakes smelled pretty good until the batter rose high enough in the pans to engulf the bulbs. Then it smelled less good.
My recollection is that we did not repeat this experiment. I don't know if we were simply unable to clean all off the cake which had been well past overcooked on to the insides of my easy-bake. My sister has the better memory for this sort of thing.
AM, what happened to the oven?
5 comments:
OMG, that is the exact same oven I had. My mom was a health food nut (no refined sugar) so my tiny, plasticky cake tasted like fucking Nirvana. Plutonium, though--W.T.F.??? Please tell me you're joking.
It totally saddens me to think of you and your sister trying to make something as innocent as cakes, and screwing it up (as kids will), while the parents pickled themselves in the other room. The Easy-Bake was always a safety risk. That bulb might have only been 60 watts, but it was HOT.
We moved on to experimenting with real cake recipes. One notable outcome was the "rubber cake", which was named because when I had sort of squished a piece up into a ball (as kids will ;) and threw it to the dog, it bounced.
Aw, well parents being pickled in the other room was better than Dad being out in the kitchen to witness the mess brewing.
I so had a very similar experience! Obviously I had that oven too! I never got to use the mixes though, because it was xmas and my older bro got up before everyone and made them all and ate them all before we got up.
Then my little bro and I blew the thing up kind of like you did. We also tried to do shrinky dinks in there... remember them??
WW, also I meant to say, yes - I am joking about the plutonium. If you go look at the new model, it's like the most child hazardous thing, a hyperbole in and of itself. Where to go from there? Plutonium seemed the obvious choice.
BTW, I do remember shrinky dinks. They were not allowed for us, not on account of any possible health risk but because the troll who claims to be our father had wicked issues with their nomenclature.
Rosey's Person
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