Transitioning To Hard Bake

Everyone knows about that cute little oven with the fake clock that says 12:30 and never changes, and has Easy Bake in large, pink letters, and has the switches that you can twist and turn each way and nothing happens. About 3 years ago, when I was about 7 or 8 years old, my parents got me this Easy Bake oven. I had always loved making Finnish (from Finland, Europe) cinnamon rolls with my mom, called pulla. (Pronounced as if it was spelled boola) Now I had my very own 'oven' so I could make treats!

It turned out this thing was sitting in the storage closet until I finally noticed when I was scooping the cat litter. I asked my dad if we could take it out, since it's been sitting there for so long and we haven't used it yet. My mom is a great cook, and whenever she bakes, I call it 'hard bake'. So I decided Easy Bake was a father-daughter thing.

The first thing we made was some sort of devil cake brownie thing. I don't understand what the devil has to do with anything- was the cake made for a devil? (What the heck IS a devil?!) Would the devil make the cake or something? Oh well. I never understood the title. The things on the cover of the box that the Easy Bake comes in are larger than they actually are. At least it seems like it. The cake that we made ended up being the size of a cookie. That's okay, the devil brownie cake thingy tasted wonderful! We even made frosting.

Compared to the devil brownie cake thing, all the other easy bake things are pretty much the same. You get the batter, mix it with some water, poor it into the pan, and put it into the Easy Bake oven. Usually there's a little something more like frosting or additional sprinkles, or maybe you are making those heart cut-out cookies where you use the little cut out thing to cut the dough into a little heart, and then you put it on the cookie thing. My favorite Easy Bake recipe?
The s'mores.

 

Doesn't it look SO good? 

Even if it's for little kids, doesn't

mean it's not delicious. 

A couple weeks ago, I bought Martha Stewart's Cookies from the Childrens Book of the Month Club.

It's a cookbook. Right away I started marking all the cookies I wanted to make with tons of sticky notes coming out of the book. The first recipe we did was called Chocolate Malt Sandwiches. Imagine a whoopy pie. (You know, two little chocolate cakes with the squishy delightful white stuff in the middle?) It's like those, only the squishy delightful white stuff in the middle is chocolaty. 

We had to go shopping for the ingredients. It seemed so advanced to be doing all this mixing with an electric mixer (we never do that in Easy Bake), and constantly adding things and making the batter when in Easy Bake the batter is premade for you and put into little packets. With 'hard bake', you have to start from scratch, which is quite fun! When we were all done with one part of it, I thought that was all, because it took FOREVER to make, with the adding, mixing, adding some more, mixing until smooth, and then making them into little balls and putting them on the pan. Which was so sticky!! Handlying that chocolatey stuff, every now and then, I had to lick my hands. That tasted sweet alright. So I was going to sit down, exausted, when my dad's all, 'Come on, Sonja! We still need to make the frosting!' and I'm all, 'There's more?!' Not that that's a bad thing, I was just so tired. I knew it would be worth the delicious chocolatey treat. So, back to mixing, adding this and that, and of course, as all bakers should do, lick their fingers. Just to get a little sneak peek taste. After all, you are the baker. We stored the frosting in this large glass mixing bowl while the cookies were baking. We decided we would eat them for dessert after dinner that night. 

I was the first one up from the table later that day, because I was dying to get one of those cookies!! I ran, got two of the cookies, spread chocolatey frosting in between them, and squished them together into a chocolate malted sandwhich. Good news: Plenty of chocolate, very delicous and filling. Bad news: a little too much salt, and not enough egg. 

Let me tell you the short story of what happened with the egg. The instructions said to add one large egg, so I got the egg, and attepted to crack it over the bowl. I am horrible with eggs. That is why a little less than half of the egg splattered to the floor, dripping on the cabinets. We cleaned it up, and didn't think it was that big of a deal. Half an egg, a whole egg, it doesn't matter. But it did. The cookies ended up being a little too crumbly. Note for future reference: Be careful with eggs, and if you drip a little, crack another egg, because you don't want to have crumbly cookies, now, do you?

I am one of those people who loves everything about food. The making of it, the actual eating it, the smell of all of it, and packing it away. I love learning how to bake, because it's a great thing to know how to do, because before you know it, I'll be making pulla with my little daughter.