The Easy Bake Oven is back! (but minus Betty Crocker)

As hard as it is to believe, I actually played with a Betty Crocker Easy Bake Oven when I was about six or seven years old. I was excited to try this out the Easy Bake Oven from Hasbro with my own kids, a four year old boy and eight year old girl. There was great excitement at the house when we opened it up, which was tempered a bit when we had to first search for a 100 W lightbulb to make it work. I could remember that we were always amazed that a simple light bulb could power an oven.

The kit includes small pans to cook in and one measuring spoon. We had to assume to that the measuring spoon was the correct size for the recipes (2/3 T), but it was not. Three ingredients packages were also included for cake, cookies and frosting.

Accessory packages exist for other kitchen tools, as well as more cake mixes. There are no directions for making cakes from other recipes, rather from the collection of other Hasbro cake mixes.

My daughter, at eight, enjoyed the toy, but said she’d rather cook in a real oven. My son enjoyed eating the cookies, but was easily distracted during the baking.

While the box says for “eight and older,” this looks like a toy for slightly younger kids with supervision. My daughter has been baking since age four, so she thought that real baking was easier than using the oven. My recommendation would be to use this for kids 5-7, but with very close adult supervision. Alternately, my daughter said she’d play with this unsupervised with another friend, but would require a lot more ingredients packs, or home-made mixes.

MSRP: $24.95

Pros:

1. Exciting for young bakers

2. Good-tasting cookies and cakes

Cons:

1. Hard to keep smaller kids from wanting to stick everything inside the oven. This toy requires supervision.

2. Too few recipes and not enough to be satisfying. You’ve only just learned to use the oven by the time you make the three included recipes. There are no recipes either using regular box mixes or normal cake ingredients. This would be frustrating for young kids who either want to continue baking, or want to use the toy on a following day. You’ll have to do some investigating on line (search “easy bake oven recipes”) to find “from scratch” recipes for them to follow or pre-mix for them.

3. Making the batter for cookies and cakes required another pan, which was fine though unexpected.

Popularity: unranked [?]