I Love This Sh!t #3
This is my Kitchenaid Professional Stand Mixer. It is not shit, it is THE shit, and I love it.
Seriously, I cannot enumerate the ways this marvelous contraption has improved my life...It is more than a mere mixing device, it is a compact, accommodating kitchen assistant, and I love it with a giddy sort of fervor.
As with all love affairs, there’s a story with tragedy, drama and pain. No, not really, more like inconvenience, sore shoulders and whining. I’ve always enjoyed baking, making cake for parties, cookies, and pumpkin bread, oh the pumpkin bread (more on this family obsession later). Baking was fun, quick, relatively easy and required only a hand mixer to whip out a boxed cake mix, or some pre-packaged bread.
Then Badger came along…Badger and her irritating, inconvenient milk and soy allergies. Being allergic to milk and soy guarantee that there are NO pre-packaged mixes from which to rapidly and magically produce anything really. Well, there ARE a few allergen-free boxed cakes, but they all came out very strange with both the consistency and flavor of a makeup sponge. After the first few, really sad, attempts at allergen-free cake from a box, I set out on a quest to find a damn-good, from-scratch cake recipe that I could make with Badger-safe ingredients.
Find them I did, and they turn out wonderful, fluffy and tasty. They also gave me incredible respect for all of our grandmothers who used to make this crap with mechanical hand mixers and whisks. Those women must have had incredible shoulders and muscle tone. Apparently, I do not because creating an edible cake with these recipes, using an electric hand mixer, resulted in such incredibly sore shoulders I could not lift my arms above my waist the next day. The pain, the horror, the stench of wintergreen IcyHot...
And then Autumn came with the annual odyssey of pumpkin bread baking…with each batch requiring the slow mixing of wet and dry ingredients in small increments for around 15 minutes. Ouch.
All was despair…until Kitchenaid came into my life. It was a fortuitous and extremely generous gift from my sister and it saved us all. Seriously, me, my shoulders and my pumpkin bread-obsessed children – all of us saved by a beautiful, functional, sexy Kitchenaid mix master.
I fire that puppy up, toss in ingredients, stir, whip, mix. A little of this, a little of that. Mix some more.
While it’s busy thoroughly folding in wet and dry, alternating incremental amounts, I’m putting away ingredients, toss in some more dry, washing up utensils, pour a little wet, and wiping counters. By the time my sexy silver kitchen assistant is done mixing up the batter, the kitchen is clean, my shoulders are just dandy, and all is right in the Puff world.
Every time I push it back to its corner, where it crouches, sleek and capable, waiting to masterfully mix up the next delicious treat, I stroke it and sigh…I LOVE THIS SHIT!
Seriously, I cannot enumerate the ways this marvelous contraption has improved my life...It is more than a mere mixing device, it is a compact, accommodating kitchen assistant, and I love it with a giddy sort of fervor.
As with all love affairs, there’s a story with tragedy, drama and pain. No, not really, more like inconvenience, sore shoulders and whining. I’ve always enjoyed baking, making cake for parties, cookies, and pumpkin bread, oh the pumpkin bread (more on this family obsession later). Baking was fun, quick, relatively easy and required only a hand mixer to whip out a boxed cake mix, or some pre-packaged bread.
Then Badger came along…Badger and her irritating, inconvenient milk and soy allergies. Being allergic to milk and soy guarantee that there are NO pre-packaged mixes from which to rapidly and magically produce anything really. Well, there ARE a few allergen-free boxed cakes, but they all came out very strange with both the consistency and flavor of a makeup sponge. After the first few, really sad, attempts at allergen-free cake from a box, I set out on a quest to find a damn-good, from-scratch cake recipe that I could make with Badger-safe ingredients.
Find them I did, and they turn out wonderful, fluffy and tasty. They also gave me incredible respect for all of our grandmothers who used to make this crap with mechanical hand mixers and whisks. Those women must have had incredible shoulders and muscle tone. Apparently, I do not because creating an edible cake with these recipes, using an electric hand mixer, resulted in such incredibly sore shoulders I could not lift my arms above my waist the next day. The pain, the horror, the stench of wintergreen IcyHot...
And then Autumn came with the annual odyssey of pumpkin bread baking…with each batch requiring the slow mixing of wet and dry ingredients in small increments for around 15 minutes. Ouch.
All was despair…until Kitchenaid came into my life. It was a fortuitous and extremely generous gift from my sister and it saved us all. Seriously, me, my shoulders and my pumpkin bread-obsessed children – all of us saved by a beautiful, functional, sexy Kitchenaid mix master.
I fire that puppy up, toss in ingredients, stir, whip, mix. A little of this, a little of that. Mix some more.
While it’s busy thoroughly folding in wet and dry, alternating incremental amounts, I’m putting away ingredients, toss in some more dry, washing up utensils, pour a little wet, and wiping counters. By the time my sexy silver kitchen assistant is done mixing up the batter, the kitchen is clean, my shoulders are just dandy, and all is right in the Puff world.
Every time I push it back to its corner, where it crouches, sleek and capable, waiting to masterfully mix up the next delicious treat, I stroke it and sigh…I LOVE THIS SHIT!
