My Take on Easy Bake Ovens

I had one when I was little. I loved it. Now that I am a parent I have different thoughts.

Emily earned her Easy Bake Oven through completing chores. She worked really hard for it, and I was proud of her for setting a goal and working diligently toward the goal. I must stress that she completed a LOT of chores to earn it. How excited she was to try it out for the first time. Instead of buying pre-packaged mixes at the store we found recipes for mixes online. They, of course, do not contain eggs or egg products so they are completely safe to be cooked under the heat of a lightbulb. 

We have baked cookies in the oven four or five times now, and the girls have always had a great time. The last time we had friends over and made chocolate chip cookies in the child-sized oven. They had a great time. Here's the thing, though. You can only bake three bite-sized cookies at a time, and it takes 10 minutes to bake a miniature batch of miniature cookies. I doubled the recipe fore EACH child and we started baking, and they mixed up their cookie dough, and off we went to the oven. We put our first batch of cookies in the "oven" at about 4 p.m. and by 8 p.m. I had resorted to heating up my adult-sized oven to finish them. So, for four hours I was a slave to this kiddie oven because my girls had LONG lost interest in finishing the task, and their friends had gone home long before. My dinner was dictated by the call of the kitchen timer to remove the tiny metal pan and make three more miniature dough balls. 

So, lesson learned. Do not make 8X the recipe unless you have lots of time dedicated for the project!!! It's a marathon -- not a 5k!!!