Easy Bake, Easy Break

The other night I was sitting on the metro after an hour of zumba (another First!) following a night of yoga (I had to leave halfway through), when I found myself sitting in a near empty car with four teenagers, two girls and two boys. The girls were American, but the boys turned out to be foreign exchange students, one from Russia, one from...possibly also Russia, but he sounded different. Maybe Nordic. At one point in their conversation about America, Easy Bake Ovens came up and one girl found herself in the position of having to explain the concept to someone who had never heard mention of such a thing.

"It's this oven....box...plastic box, and inside is a light bulb and you have packets of powder that you mix with water and you put them in little pans and you put the pans in the...oven, and you cook them...the light bulb inside bakes them...and...stuff."

Very accurate, but the exchange students were baffled. It really is a baffling concept. and it brought me back to a tumultuous time in my childhood....

The year was 1993, the year after my new sister was born, a year I was spending trying out new life choices and career ideas, the year after I realized I would never be a veterinarian after all.  I was looking for a niche, and at some point I realized that this, for me, was baking. I was going to be amazing at baking. But I wasn't allowed to touch the stove, or the oven, or really even the microwave.  This was when the Easy Bake Oven appeared on the periphery of my awareness. It was the solution to everything--an oven I would be allowed to touch, with items that were easy to bake (even then, in the throes of my baking phase, I think I knew deep in my core that at my center I was lazy and filled with hate for food-making) and looked AMAZING on the television.  Everyone was SO HAPPY eating these very small and fantastically decorated cakes.  If only I could make my parents very small cakes they would be proud of me! And then I could eat cake whenever I wanted!

I knew I had to have one.

I went to my parents, who, at the time, were still struggling with the aftermath of both having only just finished their PhDs and needing to pay everything off, having bought their very first house and having just borne a second child....so they were not super into the idea of buying me what they referred to as "stupid crap" for the astronomical price of 29.99. 

They said, "Danielle, if you want that stupid thing, you can save your money and buy it for yourself."

In 1993, to a girl with a 25 cent allowance per week and who had already started displaying what would turn out to be a life long spending-in-the-search-for-immediate-gratification problem, $29.99 sounded  back then more or less what $100,000 sounds like to me right now. Quite out of reach.

I was a dreamer, though, and once I had something like that in my head, it was impossible to shake. So for exactly one year, I saved every single cent of my allowance, conned my parents out of quarters for picking up sticks and leaves, hoarded my birthday money, and I seriously wouldn't have put it past myself to start stealing nickels from my 2 year old sister towards the end.

I clawed my way up to $30 and when I finally had it triumphant in my neon green plastic wallet, my mother agreed to take me to Toys R Us, where I bought my long awaited prize and learned some valuable lessons about what it feels like to work towards something and achieve your goals.

For a few amazing weeks, I baked many tiny cakes and covered them in sprinkles and fed all of them to my parents. By which I mean my father, who told me they were indeed the most incredible desserts he had ever come across in his years of cake eating. I could not have been happier.

Then my grandparents came to visit, and my grandmother, in an attempt to bond with me I imagine, wanted to play with me and my Easy Bake Oven and managed to melt the plastic panhandle right in the center of my oven, jamming up the entire thing and destroying it beyond repair.

I learned a valuable lesson about what it feels like to work towards something and achieve your goals and then have every moment of sweat and toil and despair thrown back at you in a feeling much like when someone throws a snowball at you and you discover the snowball had a rock inside, by using your deductive reasoning and your face.

It was a bitter, bitter blow, but I was a happy well raised child so I knew that justice would be done, everything would be righted, because no one could let such an atrocity actually take place and that my parents would buy me another one because they knew how hard I had worked, how much it had meant to me, and how unfair it would be to let my hard work go to waste. The world wasn't LIKE that. Right?

VALUABLE LESSONS WERE BEING LEARNED ALL OVER THE PLACE because no one replaced my Easy Bake Oven. No one. Not my grandmother, not my parents, and not even God. It was out of the question that I buy myself a new one, because coming up with ANOTHER $29.99 was not going to be possible. I'd lost everything. EVERYTHING.

So, I did the only thing I could do.

For THIRTEEN YEARS I brought up my Easy Bake Oven disaster at least three times a week to my parents, to my parents' friends, to our neighbors, to all of my friends, to everyone and anyone I met, I would tell them the story of heartbreak and injustice and my mother would roll her eyes and my father would not pay any attention and my sister would tell me to get over it.

But I would not get over it!!! FOR THIRTEEN YEARS.

Until one day, when I was 24 years old and living with my parents as everyone had expected, I came home annoyed at things from work and started to stomp up the stairs when I tripped over a large box.

"GODDAMN IT!" I said and glared down at the box and realized.....

"A MOTHER******* EASY BAKE OVEN??????!!!!"

My mother came out of the kitchen. "I was hoping now you'd shut up about the Easy Bake Oven."

THE LIFE LESSONS CONTINUED ALL OVER THE PLACE! It turns out, if you whine and complain for MORE THAN A DECADE and annoy EVERYONE YOU LOVE, eventually you get what you deserve!!

It was a joyous moment where the entire world righted.

I immediately baked a very small yellow cake and covered in sprinkles and took it with overflowing joy to my father, who was sitting in the computer room programming things with names like routers and nets.

"DAD DAD DAD DAD LOOK WHAT I MADE YOU!! A TINY CAKE! JUST LIKE YOU LOVE!"

My father visibly turned ashen and scooted his wheeled chair away from me. "OH NO. NO NO NO NO. NO. Please do not do this to me. I cannot eat that."

"What? But you LOVED my tiny yellow sprinkle cakes!"

"No, Danielle. I loved you.  Those cakes are disgusting. Truly disgusting. They are possibly the worst tasting things in the world."

"That is ridiculous," I said. "I ate them too and I remember they were amazing. Watch." I took a forkfull of my tiny yellow cake. "MY GOD," I said, choking on horror, "THIS IS THE MOST DISGUSTING THING I HAVE EVER EATEN."

"Yes," said my father.

I started to see why my parents did not buy me a replacement when I was 9.

So I guess the final lesson of the Easy Bake Oven is, sometimes, even if you can't see it, terrible events happen for a reason. The waxy death of my Easy Bake Oven may have broken my 9 year old heart, but it surely saved my parents'.  And because they were not forced to eat tiny cakes cooked by light bulb for more than a few weeks, they didn't grow to resent and hate me and so my childhood continued on, more or less happy.

To this day, every time I see $30 in my wallet (which is most days, because I'm a baller--and thanks to Rachael I know what that word means), I think about how I could buy myself an Easy Bake Oven any time I want. And that feeling gives me confidence and power. Easy