Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Easy (Bake) Does It

Santa brought us an Easy Bake Oven last year for Christmas.  Matthew loves to help out in the kitchen (he's a real Koszuth!).  My gripe with the EBO is that the mixes for it cost a fortune, and they taste really crappy.  As far as cakes go, I think I've solved that problem. 

I took an entire regular cake mix, put it in my food processor, and added 1/3 cup of solid shortening (Crisco).  I whirled that around until it was like coarse meal.  This acts as the oil in a regularly-baked box mix.  Then, I packaged them up in 1/4 cup portions, using those wonderful little "snack size" ziplocks.




As long as I was getting the food processor dirty, I did chocolate, strawberry, yellow and "funfetti."  These will keep as long as regular cake mix will.  For Matthew this is about a year's supply.


Remember, before you can do any "light bulb cooking" you must preheat the stupid thing for AT LEAST 15 minutes.

Do that now.  I'll wait.


When the youngun is ready to bake, take 1 egg, and beat it up with a scant 1/4 cup of water.


This is enough to do 3 of the mixes.
Next, make HIM grease the pans, because you had a mean older sister who, when you baked as kids, would ONLY let you grease the pans, and never let you do anything fun.  Like run the mixer.  Or add the chocolate chips.  Not that you harbor any resentment or anything, and you've really gotten over it.  I mean, for God's sake, your (almost) 49 already! 

Where was I?
Oh, yeah,

He's greasing the pans.  Then, lightly flour them, like you would a regular cake.  (In order to save your freshly washed floors, you may want to do this part.)  I found this is critical to getting the cake out of the pan later.


Add a scant 2 tablespoons of the egg/water mixture to the mix in a bowl, and let him use his "Whiskey" to stir it all up.


Let him pour it into the prepared pan.  Make sure the pan is no more than half full, our you'll be cursing later.  Trust me.  The worst thing for an EBO is an over-filled pan.  Help him put it in the oven, and set the cute timer Santa brought last year for 15 minutes.  


Then, every 30 seconds, answer his question with,  "Not yet!  A few more minutes!"
Make him wash his dishes.
Rewash his dishes because he only got about half the crud off.
Throw your kitchen towel into the laundry because he dried them after he "washed" them.


Help remove the cake from the oven to avoid a trip to the ER with 3rd degree burns.  You don't want to answer all those questions from DFS either. 

Let them cool 2 minutes, then invert, remove from the pan and let cool completely.   Then frost.  Yes, we used canned frosting.  I'm OK with that. 
Please don't report me to the frosting police.

I'm not sure what we were celebrating.  But it was fun.  I guess we were celebrating the first cold, rainy, fall day that we were stuck inside, so had time to bake!

A picture really is worth a thousand words.

Enjoy!


P.S.  The really nice thing about this?  There's not a whole entire cake sitting around  calling your name, making you eat it!

2 comments:

  1. ROTFLMAO!

    I bought those stupid powdered eggs and still have them... maybe I'l make scrambled powdered eggs for breakfast on Christmas Day! Yeah! That's it!!

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  2. I find the egg/water combo works well. Powdered scrambled eggs are just nasty.

    ReplyDelete