Ah, the Easy Bake Oven. A nice safe alternative for kids to bake without getting hurt or burning the house down. Amateurs!! In 1973, two housewives, Betty Morris and Kate Bloomberg, invented Shrinky Dinks as a Cub Scout project with their sons. Now, kids could go back in the kitchen and gather around the real oven!
Shrinky Dinks hit the height of their popularity in the ’80s. They came in plastic sheets that could be colored on with felt-tip pens, acrylic paint, or colored pencils. There were normally popular characters on the sheets that kids could color in. They could then be cut out, placed on a cookie sheet, and put in the oven for a few minutes. The plastic would curl up and shrink to about 5/8 of it’s original size and become thicker. The characters could then be used as toys, jewelry, key chains, ornaments, or game pieces.
This was usually a good rainy day activity. And I’m sure that the plastic or ink did not give off any toxic chemicals in the oven. At least I don’t think it changed the taste of the meatloaf that was cooked in the oven afterward. All these years later, I’m not suffering any dain bramage. Here are some commercials that you may remember. For some reason, I don’t remember any of these:
Return to the 80s 
That was a neat flash back ! …. I had He Man
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