My daughter baked me a cake last week. A very, very tiny cake. We both loved it.

The new Hasbro Easy-Bake Ultimate Oven updates the light-bulb-powered classic with a sealed-in heating element and a gender-neutral, black and silver design (the traditional pink color scheme is also available). It keeps the essence of the Easy-Bake experience, though: Fill the little metal tray with dough, slide it into the slot on the side, and you have a small cake or a batch of quarter-sized cookies that even a five-year-old can call her own. At 9 by 19.5 by 10.1 inches (HWD) and 6.7 pounds, it fit comfortably onto our kitchen counter.

For seven-year-old Nina, the Easy-Bake was a cinch, but we had our complaints. There's a sticker on the front that looks like a timer, but isn't. Why isn't it? The slot-and-tray design means everything you make has to be pretty flat, and you're cooking blind. (There's no true door you can open on this oven, for safety's sake.) The basic mixes produce some dry, odd little cookies. (The seven-year-olds don't care.) The oven is pretty impossible to clean, because everything's sealed in. The mix ingredients are pretty synthetic, too: interesterified soybean oil with distilled monoglycerides, sodium aluminum phosphate and soy lecithin all play roles in the sample cakes, brownies and treats I was sent.

The Easy-Bake's poorly-kept secret, of course, is that it's just an oven, heating automatically to 375 degrees. It's easy to use ordinary Betty Crocker cookie and baking mixes in the oven, rather than the special Easy-Bake stuff, and Nina got a big kick out of cracking an egg into the batter and mixing it up. We had to experiment with the timing a bit, but after two cakes or so, we had it down. Expect most baking routines to take at least half an hour, though: you have to preheat the oven for 20 minutes, and it took about 20 minutes to bake and cool a Betty Crocker mix cake.

The retail package comes with a metal baking pan, a tool you use to push the pan in and out of the oven, and one packet of chocolate-chip cookie mix. Other mixes cost $7.99, and you can get a cupcake pan for $4.99.

Yeah, sure, Nina can bake with a real oven. But not unsupervised. As always, that's the Easy-Bake's wheelhouse, and that's why she likes it. Kids should be able to graduate from the Easy-Bake to a toaster oven within a year or so, if they turn out to be real junior pastry chefs.

This is a good toy for five- to eight-year-olds who want to learn the basics of turning food into baked goods, and it's a fun activity to do with your kids. Stay away from the Easy-Bake mixes if you can and use standard Betty Crocker mixes instead, and your kid will be making you a little birthday cake before you know it.