Someone gave my step daughter an Easy Bake Oven for her 5th birthday... the only problem I have with this is that it's an 8 and up toy. Granted, we can help her and I really don't mind to, but my mom was smart to never give me this thing when I was a kid.
Now I'm no novice in the kitchen. I'm not intimidated by any recipe, and I can officially say after my conquering of the turkey for Thanksgiving that nothing kitchen related scares me. So needless to say, I was feeling a little cocky about this activity, but it was short lived. To be perfectly honest, I was a little apprehensive about the rattling of metal when I opened the box to start the "assembly required" portion of use for this godforsaken contraption. Deep breath- it's already assembled. The ONLY assembly required is to install the lightbulb. Need I remind you, I never had one of these things growing up. I had no idea what the lightbulb was for. Oh wait... where does the heat come from to cook these... things. This is about the point where my expectations begin to tank.
We decided to start with the "party cake" which is basically a fancy way of naming that white cake mix with sprinkles that melt into rainbow spots. The picture is pretty stinking adorable and I had a momentary lapse of amnesia. This is no different from the Betty Crocker boxed cake mixes. Ya know, the ones with the pictures of flawless, moist cakes on the front, perfectly iced and begging to be devoured? Well the finished products of those never look quite that good, but they come kinda close. Considering the fact that these are cooked in 1/2" deep, 5" diameter pans over a 100 watt LIGHTBULB, I should have figured... the picture of the Easy Bake cake has a disclaimer- "results vary." Right. A more accurate disclaimer would have been "if your finished cake is the polar opposite of the picture, you've done it right."
There is very little preparation for these things, ingredient-wise. It takes more time than anything. First you spend 15 minutes "pre-heating" the lightbulb. I swear to god, I couldn't make this shit up! You pour the cake mix in a bowl, add 2 tsp of water and stir for 10 minutes. I don't even spend that long on real cakes. One could argue my point by saying, "these are real cakes, they are just mini-versions." Um... no they aren't. These cakes have no "stickage" to them, they crumble apart when taken out of the pan and the icing? The icing in the picture HAD to have been Betty Crocker. As I was preparing the icing, my step daughter pointed out that it looked like grits. She was right. I added about 1/2 cup of my own powdered sugar to "fluff" it up more. Nope, just created more grits. Not only was there not enough "grits" to cover the cake, but I was scraping more crumbs off the poorly held-together "cake" than I was putting icing on. One could only hope it tasted good. Oh, this was my day for disappointment. My husband described it well- tastes like an iced biscuit. Now I'm curious to try that, sounds better than the sugary mush we ate today.
Oh and we tried the sugar cookie recipe too. This was almost worse, same issue with the grit-like icing, although the sprinkles were okay. Kinda hard to screw those up. The first one came out of the pan burnt and crusted up the sides. So we were gipped out of one of our four cookies it made. And I practically did the entire thing, my step-daughter just came running back in with her apron and chef's hat to "check on me" every 15 minutes or so. Which again, was fine, but that adult supervision thing was a bit understated. Again, a better disclaimer would have been, "be forewarned, you're going to do EVERYTHING." I've learned from this... next time, just buy the Betty Crocker stuff, make it the real way, plug in the Easy Bake oven to look like I'm doing it the "right" way and save myself one disappointment after another. I like that idea WAY more.
No comments:
Post a Comment