If you had an Easy Bake Oven growing up and liked it for the fun of baking small batches of miniature dessets, but are now a little bit too old to appreciate the unique flave and texture of the teeny cake mixes that come with such a gadget (or are looking for something a little hotter than a lightbulb to do the baking), you might want to get yourself a Mini Cupcake Maker to play around with. The machine looks a bit like a George Foreman grill from the outside. Inside, it has 7 nonstick mini muffin cavities. Put your batter in, close the lid, and you’ll have a small batch of miniature cupcakes, muffins or brownies in just a couple of minutes. It’s also not a bad idea if you’re looking for a little more portion control and don’t want to make a dozen or two dozen cupcakes at a time, although since most recipes aren’t scaled for such an amount, you’ll have to experiment with halving recipes when you work with one of these.
I think that you’re still going to get the best results with a “real” oven, but if time and space are at a premium, one of these little gadgets might not turn out to be such a bad thing – especially if it means you can have freshly baked cupcakes at a moment’s notice!