Not All Ovens Are Created Equal
By Laurel E. Anderson - March 18/05
Easy Bake? I don’t think so! The other day, after much pleading and begging by my 4 1/2 year old, I agreed to haul out the Easy Bake Oven so that we could bake a cake together. After much thought, we decided on a chocolate cake and vanilla icing.
Now I sometimes find my culinary skills limited but not even I thought I could succumb to the intricacies of the Easy Bake Oven. I mean how hard could it be, it’s powered by a light bulb! But I was soon to find out that it’s not as easy as the title suggests.
After reading and rereading the instructions, I set the oven up to preheat and greased the tiny pans for the cakes. My daughter was the official mixer and was doing a great job except that the cake batter seemed too watery. A quick check at the directions on the mix, which only says ‘add 3 teaspoons of water’ and I realized that I had added 3 tablespoons instead. Already I’m in trouble but my patient daughter was understanding and seemed to find the entire exercise more exciting when I told her what had happened and that we would just add another cake mix to even out the texture.
It’s now time to put the first cake in the oven, which sounds simple enough until you actually try to do it. This may be a good time to mention that this is not the newest Easy Bake Microwave, it’s the oven and it has a very small compartment to slide the pan into and you have to get it in just right and centered under the light bulb or it won’t cook properly. After a minute or two of trying to centre the pan just right, things were cooking, or so we thought. You can’t really see much through the little window.
Twelve minutes later I slid the cake out and only half of it was done. The other half was still kind of gooey. We decided that it would dry when cooling and proceeded to put the second cake in to cook and start on the frosting. This time I was right on target with my measuring and the frosting turned out great with the only battle remaining was to try not to eat all the frosting before the cakes were ready to be decorated.
This proved to be no small feat as these cakes, not much bigger than a toonie (okay, a little exaggeration), take a minimum of 12 minutes to cook and at least 10 minutes to cool. Factor in time to re-cook the gooey cake (which didn’t really work), eventually putting it in the microwave (not a good idea) and then putting it in the fridge to cool. It was obvious that this cake would be the bottom layer in this two-layer creation.
Finally, the ‘cakes’ are ready to ice and my daughter has lots of fun icing the cakes and picking clumps of cake from the knife and trying to glue them back to the cake with more icing. 20 minutes later the cake is iced and half eaten. Daughter is happy, messy and asking to make another one whereas Mommy is exasperated, frustrated and not impressed with the mess left to clean up after making a two layer cake only big enough for one field mouse.
After this activity I realized that in half the time it took to make the midget cake, I could have made an entire Betty Crocker, two layer cake with icing and would have had dessert for six. Better yet, in the same amount of time I could have made at leas two ‘Stir n Frost’ cakes that include the pan for cooking in the box, leaving almost no cleanup. Instead, it’s been just under two hours from start to finish with the easy bake and there really isn’t much to show for it!
I never had an Easy Bake Oven growing up and no longer feel robbed of what I thought was an important part of my childhood. As for my daughter, she is still excited by the ‘easy bake’ experience and so I know that wasn’t my last time cooking under a light bulb. But until then, I think I’ll introduce her to one of my all-time childhood favourites, Lite Brite. What could possibly go wrong?