Recently, my mom was cleaning out my sister and I's game cabinet, and she pulled out an Easy Bake Oven. The oven immediately conjured up childhood memories of putting on aprons and oven mitts that were too big for our hands, and attempting to make cookies out of the mixes. We opened up the box and found a mix for brownies, so we decided to make it.
While emptying the contents of the brownie mix packet into a bowl and adding the wet ingredients was very easy, some of the aspects to the Easy Bake Oven were quite frustrating. We then poured the batter into a pan that was about as small as my palm and stuck it into the oven. A simple click of the switch, and the brownie began to cook. Easy Bake Ovens cook using a 100-watt lightbulb. While this feature allows the oven to be wire-free, it makes for very slow baking. It took about 15 minutes for the brownie to cook, about half the time of a 13x9 inch pan of brownies from a standard mix! Eventually the brownie appeared to be cooked, so we tried to pull it out using the long, red plastic device that came with the oven. This was actually quite frustrating, since we ended up pushing the brownie deeper into the oven, instead of lifting underneath it and pulling it out! When my sister and I finally fished the brownie out of the oven and tasted it, we were not satisfied. The brownie tasted horrible!
On the plus side, we decided to try baking a cookie from some refrigerated cookie dough that we had in our freezer, and the cookie came out quite well. While Easy Bake Ovens are meant for young kids and are effective in providing a realistic experience of baking, they end results are often distasteful and the tedious effort is not worth the end result. I would simply suggest having a child make a treat using a standard mix, and then preparing it in a regular oven. The end result is (almost) always delicious and satisfying!
