Useless factoid #3104: "Jamba" is Swahili for "fart". Look it up, yo.

Looks like I just found a margarita maker for my car.

I'm picturing the vision of exploded raspberry puree on the walls of my daughter's room.

Mom, I made you this goldfish-flavored smoothie. Happy Mother's Day!

Does anyone know if you can remove the whirring blade? If so, the battery power and bright colors would make this a great (non-functional) addition to the kids' play kitchen. (With a "free" ice pop mold to boot!)

I had a toy mixer as a kid that did not have blade or a battery. Just two little prongs and a switch that you pushed with your finger to turn them. It churned maybe 4 ounces at a time. My older brother would beg me to "cook" him chocolate milk on Saturday mornings with that thing because it made the best chocolate milk and that was with the powdered chocolate from the late 70's early 80's. That said, I would not give my children one with a blade. I have cut myself on my Ninja!

If they were just selling the ice pop maker, for say, much, much less, I'd be in. (I like how the popsicle sticks have holes so as to grip the frozen pop.) But there is no way I'm bringing whirring blades in the guise of a toy into my house.

From someone whose daughter begged for this last Christmas: We don't use the battery-powered blender. I don't think we even tried it out, it looked that bad. And I didn't have C-batteries anywhere in the house. We just used our adult-sized blender and made the smoothies and ice pops that way. Our set came with some nice recipe ideas... um, digging deep here...

FWIW, the ice pop mold does work great.

Hmmmm...will this be a future Box of Cobwebs item?

Ooh, that just has bad idea written all over it. Yikes.

How difficult would it be to replace the batteries with an ac wall plug, I wonder? I could buy three, and we could experiment till we got it right. I think it would be fun!

I almost bought this (3) LOL on the price alone. Then I decided to go back and read. Batteries? are you kidding me? That was a close one.

Is this even powerfull enough to cut a kids finger off?

Has anyone tried?

Please let me know what happened if you have!

In regards to making it run on AC- shouldn't be too hard with a power adapter if you have basic knowledge.

My drier at home has died- but the motor seems fine... I'm wondering if I could connect that to one of these things...

On a more serious note by the way:

If your fridge at home makes crushed ice- mix it with some fruit and voila- should be good enough for that.

No sharp spinning blades and kids don't go together- but if I got one for my kids I'd be supervising them anyway... not just for safety but so that they don't make the whole house a mess.

Keep this thing out of the kids reach- and let them use it (only under supervision).

There again, if you're supervising them- might as well use the regular blender if you have one- but kids always like having their own things anyway.


It might not be as bad as everyone is making out if you just realise the limitations of the product.

Do the easy bake over. There is a toy I would buy.

I answered my own question.

http://lifehacker.com/5239690/convert-a-gadget-from-money+sucking-batteries-to-ac-power

Because what's more educational for your children than DIY electrical wiring and whirling blades?

ghostofdavid wrote:Mom, I made you this goldfish-flavored smoothie. Happy Mother's Day!

That made my morning.


One could probably replace the batteries with a transformer and plug it in to the wall. Of course, at that point you're in the The Wall mart price range for a cheap blender.

-edit- I see the poster above me had the same idea! :D
And as a side note, I'd totally let my kids play with spinning blades. If you're eight years old and don't understand that a fast whirring blade will hurt you, then it's time for you to learn.

midga59 wrote:That made my morning.


-edit- I see the poster above me had the same idea! :D
And as a side note, I'd totally let my kids play with spinning blades. If you're eight years old and don't understand that a fast whirring blade will hurt you, then it's time for you to learn.

A desire to make toys more dangerous, and a belief that children shouldn't be completely shielded from spinning, sharp danger?

If I didn't already have a boyfriend, and if I knew your gender, I would say that we should spawn and raise a child together, since we seem to agree on the important bits of child rearing. As it is, we should have play dates together someday. Since I don't think any other parents would trust us with their children.

Terrible reviews on Amazon. Apparently the blades are very weak and items going in need to be super small.

http://www.amazon.com/EZ-2-Make-1100-Jamba-Juice-Smoothie/dp/B0030CC0ZI

does this have steel blades or hard plastic blades? can't find blade material on Amazon description.

offgridmanpolktn wrote:Can anyone answer me this? Chocolate milk is a lunchtime treat a few times a week would this work without the syrup just sticking to the dish? This would let my little ones mix up on their own with fewer spills hopefully? Anyone? Thanks!

Save your money and go buy one of those handheld battery operated mixers for mixing formula. They're about $4 at babies r us. I made the mistake of sending mine to my sister in law when she watched my twins, and never got it back. They look like an electric toothbrush with a "Y" stick at the end, but very effective.

Wouldn't be such a bad toy for the bedroom kitchen if you could remove that blade. I imagine it's designed to be replaceable, so perhaps it just unscrews, somehow? Then they could throw wooden fruit in there and watch it get knocked back and forth.

As a two time loser/shmuck/child pleasing parent, we have tried a couple other "dessert" making contraptions without success. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice... you get it. Thank goodness my daughter finally got old enough to understand these things really just don't work. Except the Easy Bake Oven, that actually does make some good dessert!

slfonash wrote:My son is already asking for an Easy Bake Oven for Xmas! Even though He says "it's for a girl" (sad!) The only problems with those is how much longer can we get incandescent light bulbs???

Anyway, my freezer spits out crushed ice. Ever think of that? This looks like a cute toy (for the cheap price) even if we only end up "mixing" up fruit juice for freeze pops.

my 5 year old son has an EZ Bake and loves it! anyone who says its only for girls is losing out...haters!

I, for one, am happy to see a slight return to the toys of old that were "Almost as dangerous as the real thing, only smaller." Yeah, I don't think unsupervised use of this thing is a good idea until you really trust your kid to follow safety precautions. However, there's a decent amount of evidence now that points to kids getting hurt more and more because they expect everything they touch to be danger-proof. See the book, Nurtureshock, for more information.

Logically, that makes sense. Anyone in cub scouts years ago used to carry a pocket knife. But they drilled into you everything from how to safely open the blade, how to cut away from your body, how to pass it to another person, and how to hone it without stabbing yourself.

Now, partly because of schools, there are kids who haven't touched anything more than a butter knife until they were 12. And up to at point in maturity, they might have been safer, but once they are allowed to use anything dangerous, they tend to lack the experience in safe use of such tools or respect for the danger.

Under a "no dangerous toys, no real knifes" household policy, they'll still sometimes break the rules and do dangerous things, but just not openly or with instruction, and thus not safely.

The driving force behind much of this trend to only permit "smooth-edged plastic toys until you're 12" is not safety. It's fear of litigation. If a single parent fails to explain that putting your hand into this blender is very bad, the company gets sued, even if it's not a defective product and even if the dangers were apparent.

I'm not at all saying something like "The old days were better, when a kid could use a knife and stabbing himself was just a way to learn." No. I'm saying exactly the opposite, that he's going to actually have less incidents in his life of cutting himself if you teach him early how to respect and use dangerous tools.

It's the knife version of the condoms versus abstinence argument.

Teach your kids how to use real scissors, how to hold them, how to walk with them. When they're cooking with you, they should use real knives. They should know how to take a hot pot off of the stove or out of the oven. They should know how to use a handsaw, how to whittle, how to use a hatchet, and how to take apart most of a car or any electronics item, even if they wouldn't be able to put it back together.

See also this TED talk which might continue my rant:
5 Dangerous things you should let kids do
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

OMGawd - The honesty of the write-up makes me want to buy this thing! I don't know why. Guess I'm weird like that.

Because it's not functional enough to be a blender - think of it as a toy! You know one that can cut your kids' fingers off! Oh who am I kidding; it gets stuck on a strawberry (I read the reviews.) So that makes it safe. NOT! I'm thinking it could inflict a pretty great flesh wound. Yippee! ??????

There is so much wrong with this "toy?" "blender?" "thing???" that it defies categorization. AWESOME. Instant classic. I have NO IDEA how it passed safety standards.

and who in the HECK bought THREE? :P

specsmachine wrote:Looks like I just found a margarita maker for my car.

Thanks for the amazing idea!!! LOL

slfonash wrote:My son is already asking for an Easy Bake Oven for Xmas! Even though He says "it's for a girl" (sad!) The only problems with those is how much longer can we get incandescent light bulbs???

They redesigned the easy bake oven recently, it doesn't use light bulbs anymore.

"the toy got its 11th redesign, at the heart of which is a new heating element much like that of a traditional oven."

http://yourlife.usatoday.com/fitness-food/story/2011-09-14/Easy-Bake-loses-its-bulb-gets-a-makeover/50398642/1

Calantorntain wrote:I answered my own question.

http://lifehacker.com/5239690/convert-a-gadget-from-money+sucking-batteries-to-ac-power

Because what's more educational for your children than DIY electrical wiring and whirling blades?

Without reading the article, I don't think there's going to be much benefit in converting this to run of AC power. Since this uses batteries, the motor is going to require DC power. So you would need to convert the AC back to DC first. Most cheap AC/DC convertors aren't going to put out enough DC power to make a huge differnce. Now if you had a nice bench power supply capable of outputing higher voltage DC...That could be interesting but chances are you would burn out the motor.