It was the year of the retro-gifts this year at Christmastime. Other than the Wii my kids both wanted, the rest of their lists looked very similar to mine back in the 70s. Legos. Monopoly. A Barbie head you do hairstyles on. An Easy-Bake Oven. Way back when, Santa brought me the Legos and the Monopoly, but my feminist mother had no interest in perpetuating gender roles and stereotypes, so I never got the Barbie head or the Easy-Bake Oven. Instead I learned how to French braid my own hair and learned to cook in a real oven, so maybe it was for the best. However, knowing that I ended up cooking for a living anyway even without the Easy-Bake, I figured maybe if I bought my daughter one she’d end up a brain surgeon or Wall Street power-broker.
Well, what I’d forgotten about the Easy-Bake Oven is that once you make the two teeny-tiny cakes using the mixes that come with the oven, you have to go buy more, which cost a fortune. Twelve mixes (which are less than the equivalent of 12 cupcakes) are about $30. I may have given in to the oven, but I still have my mother’s practicality so I set off to find how to make my own Easy-Bake mixes.
Turns out there is tons online about this (I clearly am not the only one unwilling to shell out $30 for a dozen mini-mixes). You can make them from scratch, or just use store-bought “regular sized” cake mixes and scale them down to make LOTS of mini-mixes. Here are a couple of the better sites I found:
For store-bought mixes–scaled down: http://www.ehow.com/how_4701778_cheap-easy-bake-oven-mixes.html
For homemade mixes: http://www.kiddio.org/2008/07/easy-bake-tasty-cake-and-cookie-recipes-from-scratch.html
So let your little baker bake away—without emptying your wallet in the meantime!
Click here for more information about Tracy’s Connecticut cooking classes, or to read her The Secret Ingredient Blog.
Season To Taste 