It just isn't the same...

The Easy Bake oven. I loved my aqua plastic and metal oven, circa 1968. It baked beautiful (I thought) cakes with a 60 watt bulb. It was so cool. I think I got mine for my 6th birthday, and I can remember using it in the kitchen of our house in Kansas.

Today, Abby and her friends are making "cookies" , meaning one cookie, in her Easy Bake Oven. It is still aqua with white trim, but there is no metal. The knobs are fake (I could swear that mine actually worked), and it's not even an oven. It's supposed to resemble a microwave. Everyone knows you can't bake in a microwave! Well, they used to have plastic "bakeware" that came with microwaves, the ones that took up an entire counter and cost close to a thousand dollars, but did anyone ever actually bake cookies or cakes in a microwave? If they did, I'm sure it was a one time deal once they realized that rubber was not edible.

Anyway, now the Easy Bake oven has a screen behind the window (like a microwave), so you can't even watch your cake bake! How lame is that? I remember, pushing the cake in with the little metal pusher, and then watching as my cake rose in the oven. Now, Abby and her friends, shaped their cookies in the pans, pushed the pan in the "microwave", waited about 3 minutes, noticed the light wasn't on, and told me we needed a new bulb, and ran off to play. At that time, I twisted the knobs, as if that would do anything, thinking maybe I had to turn it on. Then, I realized that after one use, the bulb had burned out on our oven and Abby's friend's oven which we are also using. So, after about a half an hour, the bulbs have been changed, and our first "batch", meaning 2 cookies, are now "baking" under the 100 watt bulb. Why isn't a 60 watt bulb good enough anymore? Tim and I figure that there have been a team of kitchen scientists at the Easy Bake Oven test kitchen trying to figure out the optimal wattage for baking a cake.

I wonder how I can get that job?

Anyway, I have made 40 cookies in my real oven in the time it takes to make 2 in the Easy Bake Oven. It just doesn't hold the same magic that it did for me in 1969. I think it has something to do with the design.