Cooking Up a New Hobby

You know I love a weird national day (or you do if you’ve read several of my posts already), and I was absolutely delighted to know that there is a day devoted to the Easy-Bake Oven. 

For those who may not know, the Easy-Bake Oven is a working toy oven. That’s right. It was an oven that encouraged children to play with it.  It uses a normal incandescent light bulb as its heat source – or at least the early ones did. The newer ones have a true heating element, which does make me wonder if it still counts as a toy – or if it’s just an…oven.  

Anyway. 

The first Easy-Bake Oven came out in 1963. By 1997 (a little after I would have gotten my Easy-Bake Oven) more than 16 million of these toys had been sold. The oven also came with little round cake pans and cake mixes.  

I LOVED my Easy-Bake Oven. I used it every chance I could. I made my parents’ birthday cakes with it – and would use it to bake desserts for holidays. My little lightbulb baked cakes would sit proudly next to Grandma’s apple pie at Thanksgiving.  

I still really love making desserts – and I think it’s safe to credit some of that love to my early years with my Easy-Bake Oven. It allowed me to try out something new – and then when I was old enough, I could graduate to the real oven and continue growing my interests in sweets.  

So why do I bring this up? Well, recently you saw a post by Ellie that shared all the amazing things the library has to offer, and I wanted to expand on that premise a little bit – and mention our Library of Things.  

Now, we don’t have an Easy-Bake Oven in our Library of Things (although we do have this great e-book on the inventor of it that I think is really fun), but we do have some other kitchen gadgets available in case you are wanting to try your hand on making something for the holidays or just during these colder months.  

Want to bring some freshly baked bread to accompany a side salad for dinner? We have a bread machine that could help. 

What about some vanilla ice cream to go with Grandma’s apple pie this thanksgiving? You can check out this attachment for your Kitchenaid mixer.  

Want to warm up with some homemade soup – but don’t want to stand at the stovetop forever? You can check out an Instant Pot!  

The point is – you can use any of these items to try something new, test out a gadget you’ve been thinking of buying, or just for the sake of convenience.  

No light bulb needed. Just a library card.