Easy-Bake Oven

Mix it, bake it and eat it! The Easy Bake Oven lets kids make their own little cakes, cookies and other treats.

A real working oven made for kids. Mix up the ingredients, put the batter in the little pan, slide it in the oven, wait, and a few minutes later you have something you actually baked yourself. And eating it was definitely part of the fun.

Kenner introduced the Easy Bake Oven in 1963, and the original model used ordinary 100-watt light bulbs as its heat source. That sounds a little strange now, but old incandescent bulbs produced plenty of heat (I don’t think you’d get much heat using a modern LED bulb). About half a million Easy Bake Ovens were sold in the first year.

The appeal was that you weren't just pretending to cook. You actually mixed the batter and baked a little cake or other treat. The cakes weren't very big, and the doneness of them was questionable (remember, you were cooking them with a light bulb), and they definitely weren't going to put the local bakery out of business, but you did make them yourself and it was a lot of fun.

Over the years there have been lots of different Easy Bake Oven designs - and nowadays there are plenty of Easy Bake mixes for cakes, cookies, brownies, pizza, and other treats, cooking pan sets, and even Easy Bake Oven cookbooks. The modern versions no longer use the old light-bulb heating system, but the basic idea is still the same: mix it, bake it, and eat it.