Bulb ban alters Easy-Bake recipe

Just as suburbanites once mourned the demise of the trusty 7-gallon-flush toilet and cheap, leaded gasoline, our nation's latest environmental advancement is forcing a monumental change upon another suburban icon.

The light bulb-powered Easy-Bake Oven, which still stands in many suburbanite's memory as the most-coveted gift of childhood, soon will be history. As part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, our nation will phase in a ban on most incandescent light bulbs, beginning with a prohibition against stores selling 100-watt bulbs after Dec. 31, 2011. That energy-wasting bulb, which produces more heat than light, has baked generations of brownies, cookies and itty-bitty cakes since Hasbro unveiled the Easy-Bake Oven in 1963. But no more.

This fall, Hasbro will introduce the “Easy-Bake Ultimate Oven,” which the toy-maker hails as “a brand-new oven” with a larger baking chamber, treats “designed for today's generation,” and “a heating element that does not use a light bulb!” The oven, which still requires electricity and adult supervision, will use a heating element similar to ones found in conventional ovens.

The new oven no doubt will produce the heat needed for kids to cook goodies, but it will be hard-pressed to spark lasting memories and ignite a passion in the same way that the old bulb-powered oven did for generations of suburban children.

“We can draw a straight line between the Easy-Bake Oven and what I do for a living now,” says Gale Gand, one of those suburban kids who grew up to become the award-winning executive pastry chef and co-founder of Tru, one of Chicago's premier restaurants.

As a girl in Deerfield, Gand remembers getting a light bulb-fueled oven for her sixth birthday and feeling “empowered,” even if the gift wasn't perfect.

“My parents bought me the knock-off,” Gand says with a chuckle. “I had Easy-Bake Oven envy.”

But in her adult life as a chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, television personality, root-beer maker, wife and mother, Gand is such a fan of the original Easy-Bake Oven that she has a few of them in her home in Riverwoods. A couple of the ovens are used by her twin 6-year-old daughters, Ella and Ruby. But Gand, who adds that her son, Gio, 14, used an Easy-Bake when he was younger, still gets a kick from using an Easy-Bake oven.

“I used to have one at the kitchen table at Tru,” Gand says. As one of many famous chefs contributing to an Easy-Bake cookbook, Gand had the oven stylishly displayed at the most prestigious and fun table in Tru so she could occasionally let diners “try what I was working on.”

Patrons had a bond with that oven.

“It's about the light bulb,” Gand suggests. “It was the idea that you could cook with a light bulb.”

Hasbro officials are hoping that today's generation of kids and their environmentally aware parents will form that same bond with Easy-Bake's more conventional toy oven.

Gand supports sustainable agriculture and eating locally, and she's married to environmentalist Jimmy Seidita, who has worked and volunteered for many environmental causes during the past two decades. So she understands why the government soon will ban stores from selling 100-watt incandescent bulbs to light our homes and offices.

But she says she wishes there was “a loophole” that allowed people to still buy the bulbs strictly as a heat source for Easy-Bake Ovens. Instead she'll resort to doing what lots of suburban Easy-Bake owners might do and stockpile 100-watt bulbs, Gand says. “I'm going to buy some today.”