Mom Claims Daughter's Easy Bake Oven Sent Her Entire Family To The ER In Viral TikTok

In a TikTok video posted Feb. 20, a mom who goes by @Steph_Murphy posted a warning to other parents whose children might have an Easy Bake Oven, made by toymaker Hasbro. The five-minute video, which has garnered nearly 13 million views as of press time, recounts an incident in which @Steph_Murphy (whom multiple outlets have identified as Stephanie Murphy), her husband Ryan, and their 8-year-old daughter Nora were admitted to the hospital. Murphy believes her daughter’s Easy Bake caused the problem.

Over the weekend, while Murphy was in her bedroom packing, Ryan and Nora decided to break-in her new toy in the kitchen. As soon as they plugged it in, Murphy says, her daughter noticed a “weird” smell. Ryan, who lost his sense of smell due to Covid, was unable to detect the odor, assumed it was a standard plastic toy smell, and the pair carried on with their two-layer red velvet cake.

As the first layer of the cake baked, the family was in the living room playing video games. When the time came to take the cake out of the oven, it still hadn’t cooked through. Dismayed, Ryan and Nora decided to abandon the project and tossed the half-baked item in the trash.

But about 45 minutes after beginning the baking project, Nora began complaining of chest pains and difficulty breathing. Murphy checked her daughter’s oxygen levels with a pulse-oximeter which read 89 — dangerously low — and the family rushed to the emergency room. By the time they arrived, both Ryan and Murphy acknowledged they too were having difficulty breathing. Ultimately, all three were admitted.

Initially, doctors believed the family had carbon monoxide poisoning, but a battery of tests, including chest x-rays, EKGs, blood work — as well as a visit from the fire department — revealed that not to be the case, though both Nora and Ryan had compromised lungs. Murphy’s x-rays look normal, which she and the doctors attributed to the fact that she wasn’t in the kitchen while the Easy Bake was plugged in.

“All signs point to the Easy Bake Oven,” she notes.

While Murphy and Ryan were discharged, Nora had to be transferred to Boston Children’s Hospital. Fortunately, she was steadily improving — a new chest ray showed things were looking better and she was no longer on oxygen. After a few hours, Nora was discharged with a prognosis that she would continue to improve as her parents had.

“We were in the hospital from 6 p.m. Saturday and then she got discharged at 4 p.m. on Sunday, because of an Easy Bake Oven,” she said. “They don’t know if it was a manufacturer defect, if it was a malfunction of sorts, but there was some sort of poison that got emitted from that machine when we plugged it in.”

She then posted a follow-up video “simply to inform other parents” in case they, too, had an unusual experience with the product. “As a mom, if someone had a really negative experience with a toy that I have in my house that my child uses on a regular basis I would want to know about it. ... Do I think it’s going to happen to tons of people? No. I assume it was just a fluke thing, but it still happened and you can do what you wish with that information.

No one has officially concluded whether the Easy Bake Oven was at the heart of this significant medical scare. In a statement, Hasbro spokesperson Crystal Flynn told Romper:

“At Hasbro, we take all product safety concerns seriously. We hold ourselves to the highest standards, and the Easy Bake Oven is designed to meet or exceed those standards. We are confident that there is nothing in the design of the Easy Bake Oven or Easy Bake mixes that could cause the symptoms described. Regardless of circumstances, the wellbeing of our customers is our foremost concern, and we wish those involved a speedy recovery.”

Hasbro also told Romper that while Murphy and her family have not contacted them, their customer care team has reached out. The company also notes that the Easy Bake Oven is heated with an electric coil and cannot release poisonous gas like carbon monoxide and that while new Easy Bake Ovens may give off a smell in the first few minutes of use due to protective food-grade oil evaporating from the metal parts in the oven, said oil is nontoxic and goes away quickly. (In her video, Murphy confirmed that the unusual smell did dissipate relatively quickly.)

Ryan and Nora, Murphy shares, are receiving follow-up care via a course of steroids and inhalers. Hopefully both will make complete and swift recovery.