For my son’s 2nd birthday we bought him a book (among other things) and this book was Biscuit Bear. He loves this book, and subsequently loves baking.
So off we went to Asda, bought some ingredients and a bear cookie cutter, came home and began to bake, he helped out with the mixing and cutting out of the cookies. He got the counter in a mess with all the flour billowing about.
We put the first batch in the oven and went to sit in the living room. Whilst we were waiting for this batch to cook, we had a look at various stores for a role playing baking set. One for Henry to play with and “bake” with at his leisure.
The issue here is that apparently, nowhere sells unisex or boy baking sets (for that matter not many places sell boy orientated role playing toys,) they are all garishly pink. Now I’m not a stickler for gender stereotypes, if my son wants to play with a doll then so be it. But when a simple toy is aimed specifically at girls with no knowledge of boys who want to do the same, it’s a bit annoying.
We kept coming across sets like this which are advertised by girls, with a clear aim at girls. We contacted ELC about this. Their response was “we’re sorry that you feel this way 
It’s certainly not our intention to cause any upset. We do have a range of baking sets available in unisex colours here: http://bit.ly/1tw5o1h. However, we do appreciate your comments and we’ll get this fed back to our team.” But that set is twice the price of the one we were after, and isn’t really the one we wanted.
So in the end we decided to not bother and we went to Kiddicare to see what other toys we could get him. In the end Henry picked a shopping basket filled with various branded products. Which he loves.
Moral of the story is don’t try and buy gender specific role playing toys, either go with unisex (if you can find them) or pay a more of a premium from an online boutique store.
DadStation4 