JYLL THOMAS
Last summer my mother fell and broke her shoulder. When I spoke with her after her surgery, her biggest complaint wasn’t the pain or reduced range of motion but the terrible food at the hospital. She was also tired of the take out food my father brought her because he couldn’t cook anything more complicated than cereal with milk.
I’ve worked in the food industry from doughnut shops, fancy restaurants and catering gigs since I was thirteen years old so I know my way around a kitchen. I booked the next flight from Atlanta to Fort Myers and soon stood in awe of my mother’s gleaming new kitchen appliances. I chewed the tip of my fingernail trying to figure out how to use the convection oven.
“Oh, is it plugged in?” my mother stood next to me and stared at the stainless steel behemoth.
“I hope so. Do you know how to use this thing?”
“No, I don’t cook, I only make reservations.” She turned and shuffled back to her bedroom with People Magazine and a Miller Lite wedged under her arm.
My parents bought the high-end fridge and stove twins when their old avocado green fridge died a slow, rank smelling death. In my mother’s mind each appliance had a singular function: the microwave was used to heat water for tea, the freezer made ice and the fridge kept her Miller Lites cold. Only the oven had no purpose except to be feared and occasionally dusted. When the fridge sputtered to its tepid doom, she replaced it and the old stove without any remorse. The new shiny appliances were works of modern art—polished with a lint free cloth and revered yet never touched.
When the former pea-colored stove and I were much younger, I was fascinated by its potential for culinary magic. Flour, butter, and sugar could be combined together, thrown in the yawning maw of the oven and moments later out pops a multi-tiered confectionary masterpiece of a cake. At least that’s what that bitch, Betty Crocker, lead me to believe.
Advertisements for the Betty Crocker Easy Bake Oven dominated the Saturday TV scene. Every time there was a commercial break during Sigmund and the Sea Monsters of H.R. Puffenstuff, the screen came alive with images of children crowded around a miniature oven that birthed perfect cakes. Everyone looked so excited to be at the best birthday party ever. This voyeuristic view into happy, blonde haired, blue-eyed America brought a spark of hope to my lonely life at the bottom of a dead end street.
None of the kids at school shared my passion for drawing unicorns or reading comic books but according to Betty Crocker, everyone loved cake. With new clarity, I watched those clean-scrubbed mutants delight in dessert. If you wanted to have friends, - all you had to do was bake! It all made sense.
I begged and promised that I would never do anything bad ever again in my entire life if my mom would just buy me the Betty Crocker Easy Bake Oven for my eighth birthday. Since I only wanted one thing, my mother gathered up all her S&H Green Stamps books and traded them in for my ultimate present.
The day of my birthday there were only two guests at the party; my older sister, Frannie and Lori Caputo who lived across the street from us. I didn’t care because I knew I was getting the Easy Bake Oven and pretty soon I was going to have lots of friends. Besides, Lori was everything. She was three years older than I me and wore blue eye shadow, bubblegum scented lipstick, and short shorts made out of hot pink terrycloth. Lori lived in a smoke- choked house with her mother and grandparents. Heavy velvet drapes were closed tight against the blistering Florida sun. Light from the flickering TV illuminated the slack face of her unmoving grandmother as she sat in her orange recliner puffing on endless cigarettes.
After school, Lori and I stole cigarettes from her mother’s oversized, fringed suede purse. I wanted to impress Lori but I was too scared to light a smoke and actually inhale. Still, I tried to look cool sucking the minty tobacco of the unlit Marlboro Menthol. But now that I was getting the Easy Bake Oven, I would be as badass as Lori on her banana seat bicycle with the tasseled handlebars.
After I opened up the hand made card from my sister and a Bonnebell strawberry lipsmacker from Lori, I unwrapped the Easy Bake Oven. We marveled at the cute, tiny stove replica. It was shaped like a bright, red plastic square stove covered in yellow basket weave print with small red flowered applique. There was a slot at one end to push the cakes into to cook under a sixty-watt light bulb and a slot at the other end where a perfect miniature cake would magically appear. I ripped open the included Devil’s Food cake mix packet, poured it in one of the miniature, round Easy Bake cake pans, added water and shoved it in the oven.
Ten minutes later, I used the plastic accessory stick to push the pan from under the light bulb to the exit slot. Everyone crowded around just like in the commercial to see the first homemade cake baked in my mother’s kitchen. The cake was wobbly and flat with little white particles floating around the raw middle.
“Mom, why is there rice in my cake?”
My mother took one look at the chocolatey mess and threw the whole thing in the garbage, including the adorable, metal pan. She opened up the other baking packet of yellow cake mix, looked down in it and threw that in the trash as well.
“I’m sorry, honey, maggots got into the mixes at the Green Stamps store. You’re going to have to pretend bake.” She shuddered as she scrubbed her hands with Dawn dishwashing liquid in the kitchen sink.
The Betty Crocker Easy Bake Oven was a soul-scarring failure. Lori followed my sister to her room to listen to the Bay City Rollers on her record player and read Tiger Beat magazine. I skulked back to my comic books and sketchpad filled with mythological creatures. My little brother rang the death-knell of the Easy Bake oven by melting a plastic GI Joe action figure under the naked light bulb.
While my mother tended to her broken shoulder with trashy magazines and cheap beer, I baked a chocolate cake in her brand new oven. I wouldn’t win Star Baker on The Great British Baking Show but it was maggot-free and I made it without any help from Betty Crocker.
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