~from Jill

I saw a good friend recently, and the subject of Easy-Bake Ovens came up. She has a 6-year old girl, and I was asking if she enjoys doing activities with her, like using the Easy-Bake Oven. Someone else remarked that they never seemed to get the mixes right, and suddenly I was eight years old again, shrieking, “I have a book full of recipes with the best Brownie Mix you’ve ever tasted!”

My friend laughed at my sudden excitement, and I gabbed on a few minutes longer about light bulbs, baking chambers, and oven designs.

I’m not the only one who still expresses interest in these ovens. “The Easy-Bake Oven Gourmet,” by David Hoffman, is filled with anecdotes from World Renowned Chef’s and cookbook authors about their childhood fascination, and desire for this product. It includes recipes like “Roasted Quail Breast with Wild Mushrooms and Pomme Anna,” and “Warm Kumquat-and-Date Sticky Toffee Pudding,” which you can mix yourself in little plastic bowls and bake in mini tin pans.

The subject of both Barbie dolls and Easy-Bake Ovens are loaded for me, filled with memories of childhood longing. My father Pastored several Baptist churches during my childhood, and my mother was the antithesis of the happily-content-to-bake-cookies Pastor’s wife. Thin, miniskirted, hair long and swinging (think Cher, not Ruth Graham), she produced soufflés, pastries and gleaming dark chocolate desserts, which she served in sparkling white serving-ware, never plastic. I had hand-stitched rag-dolls and wicker basket doll beds. I longed, of course, for the Barbie dream-house (with matching patio set), and troll dolls with wild sherbert-colored hair. Also, a turquoise-colored plastic oven of my own to bake with, but my sophisticated mother pronounced these ovens, and their mixes silly.

“Why not use a real bowl and pan and cook with me?” she asked. Her inability to understand my longing forced me to spend hours with a friend I didn’t like and her avocado-colored, wood-paneled Easy-Bake.

For my fourth grade birthday party, my mother made a dessert of ice cream topped with a blend of Corn Chex, chocolate and nuts swimming in hot fudge, served in authentic clay pots. There is a picture of us smiling in the doorway of our house, myself holding one of the flowerpots: I was not happy. Even then, in my traitorous heart, I longed for a hot pink Barbie doll sheet cake.

I didn’t ever realize why my obsession continued, why even as an adult I baked these cakes at Christmas with my sons (gasp), using the “Queasy-Bake” oven to lure them with dog bone drool cookies, or mud n’crud cake.

The Easy-Bake Oven promised then what it promises now: sameness. One oven, now sold in pink and white (or avocado and yellow -- in 1978), pre-measured mixes to produce sticky chocolate layer cakes. The packing whispers, You can be like every other girl in America. While you sit, and wait for that tiny cake to rise, you are not different. Of course, by the same token, you are not unique, but who in elementary school wants to be that?

What I wouldn’t give to walk through my old bedroom now, look through my eyelet curtains at the birch trees of our old front yard. I’d love to whisper to that 9-year old girl the value in being different, but I know she won’t hear me. She’ll be holding her knees, and dreaming of rows and rows of perfectly iced tiny, flat cakes to serve at her next birthday party.