Easy Bake Oven? Hardly.

Did you ever have an Easy Bake Oven? I did. I loved that oven. I would "bake" anything I could get my hands on. We would stick cookies in it to warm them up, and buy lots of mixes and make cakes and brownies, and all sorts of yummy stuff. I really loved it-you felt like a big person, being able to work with a very hot object and not get in trouble doing so.

I remember getting my oldest daughter one when she was little, but I don't think she got into it very much. I also used to buy her tons of Barbies and she never really played with them either. I'm seriously thinking that maybe she was switched at birth.

I talked my youngest into asking for one for Christmas from Grandma. Last night, I was asking myself, Why did I do this?

For some reason, I don't remember it being so hard to use an Easy Bake Oven. Or, how messy it is to use one. Or, how long it takes to bake four microscopic cookies. How? How, did I ever love this little simple piece of machinery?

I had promised her that we would make her cookies mix and cake mix after I got all my work done. After reading the directions, I carefully put the mix in a bowl and found out you can only add about three drops of water to the mix. I nervously added the water and accidentally added too much. Wow. You NEVER want to add too much water to these space age mixes. It turned out slimy, but we still used it-at six dollars a mix, we are using it.

We finally got the four cookie balls made and I realized that they wanted you to only cook one cookie at a time for ten minutes a cookie. What? Ten minutes? What five year old is going to wait that long for EACH cookie? Had I known this earlier, I would not of waited until 8:30 at night to do this.

So, I helped her push the pan in, not realizing that you have to mush the cookie down, so it would go through the door. Now, we had cookie dough stuck on the door. Not good.

We survived the first cookie, but learned that you don't really want to leave it in for the time that they say, or you will have a cookie that is burnt on the bottom and those little boogers do not want to come out of the pan.

We also found out that the frosting can be very picky too. I think I must have either added too much water, or not enough. After five minutes of trying to get it to stick to the water, I pulled out a can of frosting from the fridge and suggested that green frosting would look so much better.

After the cookies were all baked, I figured she'd be too tired or bored to make the cake-I know I was. Nope. She was all excited to make the cake because she was going to be a "cooker" when she grows up and she's going to use her Easy Bake Oven to make yummy desserts. I'm thinking, yeah, to use it as a step stool.

So, we finished the cake and luckily, the frosting decided to work for us. For some reason, the cake looked and tasted just like the cookies. Had I known this earlier, I would have suggested we made the cookies as a cake too and saved alot of burnt fingers and cursing.

She was so proud of her cake, she wanted me to take a photo of it.

Next time she wants to use that Easy Bake Oven, I'm going to tell her there's a new Happy Meal toy at McDonald's, and afterwards, I'll buy her a dozen pink frosted cookies from the bakery down the street.