Cooking in the playroom: the Easy-Bake Oven
Like building sets and chemistry kits, toy ovens allowed kids to explore and practice adult skills. Toy ovens have a long history, starting in the late 1800s with miniature iron stoves, but only in the 1960s did they really take off with the invention of the Easy Bake Oven in 1963.
Easy Bake Ovens were invented by the Kenner toy company, which specialized in educational toys that let kids experience adult tasks. A toy oven was a natural fit, but previous attempts did not have the greatest safety record. The company experimented with different ideas until they came up with a revolutionary solution: heating the oven with light bulbs. Incandescent light bulbs can get extremely hot, especially in small spaces, but they were also familiar and seen as safe by most parents. Therefore the Kenner company was able to promote their product as safer than previous versions, even going so far as to name the new toy the Safety Bake Oven. The name, however, was struck down by regulators as false advertising -- the oven hadn't launched yet, so there was no safety track record to prove whether or not the oven really was as safe as the company claimed.
The re-named Easy Bake Oven was an instant hit. The company launched the product in the holiday season of 1963, and it sold out almost immediately in stores around the country. Along with the oven, kids could buy pre-made mixes to bake in the ovens, or make up their own recipes using ingredients already at home. Early reports said that the mix-made cakes didn't taste very good, although whether that was a flaw in the mix or the result of impatient kids taking the cakes out early is still up for debate. Despite the complaints, Easy Bake Ovens only got more popular over the years.
Originally, Easy Bake Ovens were designed to match real ovens. Because the early models needed two light bulbs, one at the top of the oven and one at the bottom, to ensure even cooking, they couldn't be shaped like regular ovens. Instead, Kenner manufactured their ovens in colors that matched the trendy kitchen colors of the 1960s and '70s. Later, after they had refined the technology to use only one light bulb, the ovens changed to look more like microwaves, the new trendy appliance of the late 1970s and '80s. Later still, the design philosophy changed again, and the ovens abandoned realism completely, instead being designed to appeal specifically to children, especially to girls. By the 1990s, the ovens were bright colors, often purple, and could be shaped like anything from a regular microwave to a futuristic bubble.
Although the light bulb system was still being used, designers of the oven, now owned by Hasbro, worked to find an alternative. Light bulb heating was in danger, as changes in light bulb standards encouraged the production of fluorescent light bulbs instead of incandescent ones. Fluorescent bulbs generate much less heat than incandescent ones, making them more energy efficient for lamps but completely unsuitable for cooking. In 2006 Hasbro released a new model that used a more oven-like heating system. Unfortunately, the return to traditional heating sources meant the return of traditional safety issues, and the product had to be recalled after children started burning themselves on the toy, sometimes very badly. In 2011, Hasbro released an updated version, the Easy Bake Ultimate Oven, that moved the heating element deeper into the oven, keeping it out of reach.