Easy Bake Chef

Easy Bake Chef

The heart of this concept was simply to encourage play: supply 5 chefs (and 1 bartender) with childhood cooking toys from the 1960s to the 2000s. The challenge for them would be to create a dish not just inspired by the toy but ideally, crafted using it. Well, at least in theory, given the constraints of time and practicality. For us, we knew each toy would need a matching environment so we built six scenes mirroring classic toy advertisements

When bartender Chris Allen was a kid, he would sneak into his sister's room to play with her Barbie pink Easy Bake Oven, something his parents wouldn't give him. Originally aspiring to be a pastry chef, he stumbled into bartending and found that there were a lot of similarities between the two. Upon meeting Chris, there was an undeniable joy to his demeanor - we knew he was perfect for this project. We handed over a 1994 Doctor Dreadful Drink Lab, asking him to build a cocktail using another toy his parents wouldn’t have bought for him.

Chef John Yelinek was given the 1969 Suzy Homemaker Grill. John's concept was guided by his memories of the outdoors; his youthful days hunting and fishing. “Cooking over a fire, in a campsite, you have to adapt. There's something satisfying about making it work,” he tells us as he's preparing the foraged mushrooms and squab. His current approach in the kitchen, driven by innovation and play, is obviously rooted in these early experiences. He’s managed never to lose that early sense of adventure and joy, never taking cooking too seriously.

Chef Lena Sareini, a James Beard recognized pastry chef, recalls how she had this exact model, a 1992 Easy Bake Oven, before her mother threw it away. She nostalgically recounts trips to Target with her sister, grabbing every mix-in they could get their hands on. "And we would make a mess all the time. My mom would get so annoyed that we wouldn't clean up after ourselves, so she ended up throwing it away without telling us." She admits these early experiences with the toy influenced her career path. Lena's creations are the tiny, fully decorated, dreamy cakes that every kid believed would emerge from that oven, rather than the semi-baked attempts of our collective childhoods.

The Easy Bake Oven, deemed not 'masculine' enough for little boys of the early aughts, evolved into the 2002 Queasy Bake Cookerator. Instead of cupcakes, it made "mud cakes with gravel" (chocolate cake with pop rocks) and dog bone cookies with drool frosting. Most people I talked to didn't remember this one, but Chef Rece Hogerheide's face lit up when he heard the name and was immediately taken back to his childhood. He wanted to be a chef his whole life, owned the Queasy Bake, and vividly remembered opening the little packets and their smell. His dish is the adult version of gross-out kid culture we grew up with, referencing Silence of the Lambs, not shying away from the dark humor of it.

Chef Mike Finsilver, the perfect curator for our 1994 Doctor Dreadful Food Lab. His childhood days spent in the garden amidst bugs and dirt seamlessly translated into dishes that evoked memories and imagination - think pureed squash worms and purple carrot dirt. Tiny tomatoes become petri dish cultures. The main dish, malfatti, served up as monster skin, was a tribute to creativity unhindered by practicality. "When you’re cooking professionally there's a level of practicality you have to have. You’ll never see malfatti at a restaurant because it’s too hard to make at scale. But with projects like this, you’re able to rethink what you would make if you could make anything"