What headache and cleaning? You throw your shit in the bowl, slap on the head you need, use it, then wash the bowl and the head. Exact same amount of work as using a hand mixer. Or a spoon, for that matter. Except with the stand mixer, you can just flip the switch and go do something else, instead of standing there giving your arms a workout. And with the hand mixer, you have two beaters to wash instead of one, and the bars are closer together so it’s a bigger nuisance to get the back side of them clean.
We use ours a lot. There’s the occasional week that goes by without it getting used, but those weeks are rare and more than balanced out by the weeks we use it every single day. When we’re getting ready for a party or I’m doing holiday baking (I totally cram full two medium-sized deli trays of cookies and such for him to take to work), the bowl winds up getting washed four and five times in a single day. Plus I make marshmallows, which are nothing at all with the stand mixer, but would be a miserable, daunting prospect without it. Hell, this past Friday I made three batches of marshmallow and a couple lemon ice-box pies with it. If our oven had been working, we would have made some bread and maybe some brownies, too. (Derby party prep.)
It totally wouldn’t be worthwhile to most of the people we know, but we’d give up the crockpot and the toaster oven and one of the tvs before we’d give the mixer up.
Sorry - didn’t mean to start a flamewar here. Obviously there are people out there who love AND use their KA products. I’ll simply go on record as saying my wife only fits the love category. The sweet potato soufle thing is recipe she got out of an obscure cookbook that generates a mush with the consistency of wet concrete, which is why she insisted she needed the powerful KA to begin with, and that IF ONLY she had the KA, she would use it that much more… As you might guess, I am a little bitter about it. No, it is not a pain to clean. More to the point, the recipe she does now is simply slices sweet potatos and some kind of cane syrup stuff that involves a lot more general cutting and no mixing. I’d estimate our KA has now not been turned on once in over three years.
I, too, could write poetry…nay…sonnets of the gooey kind to my Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer.
There are very few items I cherish, but if a burgular was caught in my house with my Kitchen Aid Mixer and the TV in his hands work with me here., I would let him take the TV and help him load it into his car, but if he took the mixer, his balls will be severed and then fed to him.
What, no running them through the mixer first? Or through the sausage-making attachment?
I haven’t used it as much now that I’m working on dropping a few pounds (I make an evil cheesecake, with a pumpkin variation for the winter holidays), but I intend to start it up for some bread experiments.
I love love love my KitchenAid mixer. We’ve had it for 15-20 years. I have the kind where the bowl lifts up. It is totally worth it. We use it once or twice a week. Great for cookie dough.
I bought my mother one when her mixer broke. She also loves it. She loves to make bread with the dough hook.
My husband gave me one for Christmas three or four years ago. I’d gotten tired of doing things by hand and asked for a stand mixer. He decided that it was better to spend the money to get the good kind, and I’m glad he did. I wouldn’t have asked for one that cost that much money.
The first thing I mixed in it was a double batch of gingersnaps. Went through that heavy molasses dough like it was water. Wow! I don’t use it that much, but I’m so glad to have it when I need it.
My KitchenAid microwave is less than 4 months old, and hasn’t worked since late March. They refuse to replace it, saying the warranty only covers repairs - I have been waiting for a part to come in from Detroit (to Toronto) since the last service visit, April 15th. 6 weeks without a microwave, and so far, their best goodwill gesture has been to offer me an extended warranty. No sign of the part as of today’s phone calls.
I have absolutely nothing good to say about their customer service, and strongly recommend against buying their brand.
Yikes! Clearly a brand to avoid, for anything other than mixers!!!
Oh, and the Kitchen-aid branded chip-bag clips I bought a few weeks ago (yeah, really… but it was what the store had) seem to be working fine.
I do have a question for those of you with the bowl-lift variety: How do you put the bowl onto the mixer, if it’s got stuff in it already? Seems you’d have to tilt it pretty far to the side, spilling the contents, to get it around and under the beater. Similar question for removing the bowl.
Or do you attach the beater after the bowl is in place?
This confusion is why I opted for a head-tilt model.
::shakes fist::
Dang! why do you need to throw that out there? Just today I ripped a seam on a pair of my fancy and expensive dress pants!* Ideas like this are the last thing I need!
Yes, all brioche related recipes, Please!
I still maintain that the pants must have shrunk. Now that I live at a lower elevation, the increased air pressure has compacted the fibres. That’s my story, sticking to it.
I bought the most powerful hand mixer I could find and it still struggles with something like cookie dough. If I had the counter space and the money I would buy a KitchenAid.
So she never bakes anything else, like cookies or cake?
I can’t live without mine. And I recently got the SideSwipe blade, and I love that, too. I couldn’t make gingerbread cookies or peppernuts without it my KA, and my mom still can make bread at 83 because the mixer does all the work. Good tools are worth the price.
I thought the point of peppernuts was to build arm muscles? I bake as much as my waistline can afford, and I don’t even use a hand mixer - wooden spoons and whisks all the way. I’m suddenly feeling very hard done by.
