The EZ Bake oven.
Budding young baker that I was, and even though I hadn’t asked for one, I was thrilled to unwrap this on Christmas day! Santa had even brought one of the big old expansion sets that went with it - someone in the other thread mentioned they got the wedding cake expansion; mine was more cakes, cookies, pies, sprinkles, brownies, frosting, plus tiny animal shaped cookie cutters, tiny plastic rolling pins, pie tins, teeny little measuring cups and spoons, and small plastic utensils. Neat-o!
So, I got everything ready, turned on my cool new oven, peeked inside - um. It was a lightbulb. That’s an EZ Bake oven: a box with a lightbulb inside. You slid your little tray under the light and waited an hour or so for that little, teeny cake to bake. The “cakes” would always come out hard as a rock. I would cut back on the time, and end up with cake that was mush in the middle. There just never seemed to be a happy medium. I couldn’t find that magical spot that you could slide that tiny cake out of there, somewhere between soggy mush and crunchy rock. The cookies were small and crunchy, too, but that was okay. It just didn’t make enough of them. It was like waiting an hour for two animal crackers. The brownies were the same as the cake - there was some magical, mystical time that could never quite be achieved.
The fruit pies, however, were pretty good. I remember waiting an hour for my little apple pie. Mmm. That was A-OK.
I remember using up all of my pie mixes, then saving the cookie cutters to cut my mother’s real cookies out, making much more of the little things, and saving my sprinkles and frosting mixes for Mom’s “real” cooking, as well. The cookie, cake, and brownie mixes got thrown into the spare closet, alongside the EZ Bake. It was all thrown out years later during a good closet cleaning, with no regrets.
