Recently I have been researching stand mixers. They’re kickass, and anyone who has ever watched anything on the food channel wants one – I guarantee it.
I decided I wanted one as a result of watching Annabel Langbein’s show (The Free Range Cook, I think it’s called).
On Tuesday morning, we went out to get my boyfriend a multimeter (his laptop just had a cry and stopped charging, and being the electrical geek that he is, he figured out where the problem was using a multimeter) and I thought hell, why not stop into a few shops and scope out some mixers. I just wanted to see what was around, really. I’ve done a fair bit of research, and worked out what the good brands to be looking into are.
Anyway. At the first shop, I found the BEM800, in red, for $510. Not bad, seeing as it’s standard retail is around $750. It was around this point that thoughts started to creep in like, ‘I’m going to do so much baking this summer’, ‘It’s such a good deal,’ ‘I did just graduate and get a payrise’, and ‘I’ve made so much extra money from tutoring’.
At shop 2, $498, but only in silver.
At shop 3, $443, but they only had the shelf model left! However, they are a chain store (Briscoes, for kiwis) and we figured what the hell, we’d head to the next nearest store. It was at this point that buying a mixer became especially urgent – they were $443 reduced from $740, and the sale ended at midnight!
At shop 4, we found about a dozen of them in black, red, and silver. Obviously I got red.
This is me opening it … I don’t think I have ever looked so joyous. Seriously, like a kid on Christmas day.
And this is what it looks like. It has one dial, which controls power and mixing speed. It comes with four attachments – mixer, scraper mixer, whisk and dough hook. It has a timer, which can count up (to figure out how long a recipe takes to mix) and down (for those ‘beat for 3 minutes’ type of instructions – and the motor switches off then as well).
So, what was the first thing I made?
… cupcakes, of course. Double chocolate boysenberry (those are hiding in the middle) with boysenberry buttercream frosting.
Beautiful, right?
And, just for fun: me being a pirate with a dough hook (a dough pirate!).
