Easy Bake Chef

Emily got an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas and she's been having a good time with it! She loves to help in the kitchen, but generally, we're rushing to get dinner done (and let's face it, having help in the kitchen in the way of a 6.5 year old girl does NOT often actually speed up the process as the word "help" would imply!), and I try to limit the amount of baking I do so that we aren't being tempted by SWEETS all the time, so she doesn't get to help as much as she'd prefer. With the Easy Bake oven, we get the chance to bake together, but the finished result isn't much more than a few bites for each person in our family, so we get the best of both worlds!!

I will say, the first time we used it, we made these darling little cookies (the white cookies had chocolate hearts in the middle, and the chocolate cookies had white hearts in the middle), and we did a double batch in order for each person in the family to get one (with three cookies leftover for three kids the following day), but standing around for 11 minutes EACH COOKIE got old FAST, and I pulled out the toaster oven and baked the last 5 cookies all at once that way. ha!!

The second time we used it, our little cakes rose above the tops of the little pans, so when we pushed them out the slot and onto the built-in cooling rack, the tops got ripped right off. One of the layers came out pretty mutilated so it was difficult to frost, but it was tasty nonetheless!


Emily carefully decorated the cake with some Christmas sprinkles we had in the cupboard:


And I should point out that she was ever so (grudgingly) kind as to allow her brother to help as well:


What's even more amazing about this new "toy" of Emily's, is that though you can buy the fun refill packs of cakes and cookies, you can also get online and find THOUSANDS of recipes specifically for the Easy Bake Oven. So now we're really only limited by what ingredients we have in our house at the time we decide to hunt up recipes.

Bon Appetite!