KitchenAid: Friend or Foe?

My fiancé and I were on a merry frolic through Myer’s kitchenware section, zapping items for our gift registry when, on a whim, we beeped the tag for a shiny KitchenAid stand mixer.

It was the first time I’d even touched a mixer, let alone considered owning one.  My feelings about cooking have vacillated between short bursts of enthusiasm and misery.  When I first moved into my little flat, I spent many hours in my kitchen with Nigella Bites splayed across the dining table, whisking, chopping, manically zesting lemons, creaming butter and sugar.  I lovingly ladled gooey muffin mixtures into trays, hurled bread dough onto the bench with gusto, snuck into the kitchen late at night to savour chewy mouthfuls of freshly baked brownies.

This initial culinary enthusiasm waned when life got busy and I succumbed to dinners of tinned tuna on crackers.  My weekly trips for trolleys laden with fresh groceries became rushed expeditions for “Deli Reduced” sausage rolls ten minutes before the shop shut.  Sometimes, I found myself hunched over my tiny sink, weeping while scrubbing dishes with my hands encased in sweaty gloves, despairing that I’d never have time to write a Booker prize winning masterpiece because all my evenings would spiral into bleak cycles of cooking and washing up.

So, imagine my trepidation when it transpired that my cavalier use of the Myer scan gun resulted in some generous friends chipping in for a mixer as an engagement present.  I stood with my hand over my mouth as my beloved hefted an ‘Almond Cream’ mixer out of its behemoth box and hoisted it onto the kitchen bench.  The silver bowl glimmered mutinously; there was nowhere to store it except in full view, where it aroused guilt every time I caught glimpse of it in all its unused, sparkling glory. 

In the weekends that followed, my heart sank like a botched soufflé as my partner uttered the dreaded words: “Let’s bake today”.  Despite KitchenAid’s claims that the mixer would “make food triumphs thrillingly easy”, baking was never simple.  We drove across town to three different Asian grocery stores on a quest for matcha, one spoonful of which we used for a batch of Martha Stewart’s green tea shortbread.  We shuffled social engagements to accommodate cake baking times, rang neighbours’ doorbells to borrow a rolling pin, jostled each other in the kitchen reaching for bulging bags of flour, knocking cascades of icing sugar across the floor. 

I secretly hoped that our new expensive gadget – with all its mashing, beating, whipping, grinding, shredding appendages – would make me more domestic, like buying Lululemon ‘Turbo Run’ shorts will make me a better runner and a new MacBook Air will improve my writing.  Even though I haven’t morphed into a smiling, apron-clad hostess with an endless store of warm chocolate chip cookies, the mixer has coaxed me back into the kitchen and helped me dread it less. 

At a recent family lunch, we unveiled a pumpkin cake with almond icing to a sceptical audience.  I’ll confess that the sight of the men putting down their beers, leaving the vicinity of the television and slicing some generous second helpings for themselves was kind of gratifying.