LGR Fires Up Hasbro’s 1999 Easy-Bake Kitchen Keyboard Playset

Storage still coughs up late-90s leftovers for Clint Basinger of LGR, and the latest one is a molded kitchen that sits on a PC keyboard and pretends to bake. Easy-Bake Kitchen, sold by Hasbro Interactive in fall 1999 for about $40, arrived as a CD-ROM plus a strap-on playset aimed at ages three and up. Box copy promised to turn a Windows 95 or 98 machine into a kitchen full of fun with no waiting and no mess. LGR found his copy years after a viewer named Ryan Kitty mailed it in, then pulled it back out after a hurricane soaked the downstairs collection room in what he calls storm juice. A scrub later, the plastic was ready for another shift.

That year, Hasbro focused heavily on CD-ROM playsets. The Tonka Workshop and Star Wars Millennium Falcon overlays had already demonstrated the concept: take a cheap, molded toy, insert some genuine keys, and couple it with a slideshow of colorful software that requires no additional ports. Just this year, Playskool received a cash register version, Mattel tried Matchbox, and Easy Bake Kitchen followed the same basic concept.

This small playset has eight utensils on the overlay. When you press a measuring cup, it will tip. Pushing an egg against a bowl causes it to fracture. When you command it to, a mixer descends into the well. An oven door opens, and a dial turns on or off. Dough can be stamped out with a knife or cutter when desired. When you press down on a piping bag, it offers a slight squeeze. A lumpy piece of plastic dough is flattened with a rolling pin (which is the only loose piece and will most likely be lost first by families). Each of these actions involves inserting a pointed bit into an actual key. That’s it for the interface; the guidelines also advise against using laptops or ergonomic keyboards. LGR discovered this the hard way after extensive testing, and sure, a basic desktop keyboard, including a robust old Model M, can happily accept the straps. A wooden Dell Inspiron 600M simply slides across the desk because laptop keys are too shallow for the small nubs to catch.

The CD was manufactured by KnowWonder, the same company that created the Microsoft Magic School Bus titles. A Pentium 90, 16 megs of RAM, 50 megs of disk space, SVGA, a sound card, and a mouse were the minimal requirements. When you launch the software, a greeting animation shows Sally Sprinkle finding an empty cookie jar, asking her sister E.B. for help, being turned down because E.B. is at the movies, and dozing off into a baking dream. Billy Batter and Maggie, the TV cook, are helping her out. Kids can use the on-screen recipes to produce a variety of delicacies, including muffins, brownies, biscuits, cakes, pies, pretzels, and a variety of cookies. Or they can simply put a bunch of random ingredients into the mixing bowl and watch what happens. Leaving the thing for too long causes smoke to roll across the fake counter.

You can clean up the mess with a mop icon, and there are extra rooms for decorating, a gingerbread man hunt, a speed-bake competition, a game where the cookie dough gets out of control, an icing game where you have to hit as many cookies as possible (and not worry about frosting anything else, how fun is that?) and a tea party where a dinosaur, a dog, and a grannie all eat up the finished plate and leave crumbs all over the place. If you want to get creative, there are prints for gift boxes, party invites, and even real-world recipes if you’re feeling adventurous enough to get flour all over your actual kitchen.

LGR chose to put one of the muffins through the entire baking process: oven on, flour in the cup, milk and oil, two eggs, mixer, tray in, door shut, wait, door open, oven off. Decorating the object required the use of a squeezy bag. LGR saw that the visitors at the tea party ate their food so quickly that he assumed they were a bunch of ungrateful little monsters. He also said that a third of the minigames available are simply designed to keep those same eight nubs busy, because, at the end of the day, the item is just a keyboard disguised. He went so far as to remap Doom II utilizing the thing. The mixer moved forward. The egg turned left. The dough went right. The oven door opened, revealing maps. The piping bag actuated the trigger.