my new toy

don't mind the mess on the counter....

its my 3rd baby after my dog and my nice camera  : P  I love this thing and I can't believe how long it took for me to hop on the bandwagon.

at one point I only had a hand mixer, which worked fine until I killed it making ginger sparkle cookies... the dough just gets too thick for most machines to handle. so I bought another with more power and its served me well in the years since killing the first one. when one of my aunts bought herself a kitchenaid mixer she gave me her old stand mixer. I loved that thing and couldn't believe I had been using just a hand mixer all those years! lol. though it was a bit of a pain scraping the bowl and the beaters because there were 2 it was like a hand mixer and a little difficult to scrape what was on them back into the bowl to be properly mixed. but it did make mixing a lot easier, just not any cleaner because of the low sided bowl for it so it made as much of a mess as a hand mixer with the dry ingredients... sure took the elbow grease out of the baking equation though.

when I decided to do a TON of baking this year (read: doubling and tripling recipes) I was hesitant to use the stand mixer because of how much of a mess would be created so I bought a bigger mixing bowl and just used the hand mixer, which I had to stand on a stool to make it easier on my arm. i'm just too damn short to hold that thing up for the thicker dough. it also took a while to get anything mixed because i'd have to scrape the beaters so often to ensure it was properly mixed together.

I posted a pic on FB of the new bigger mixing bowl next to my smaller one with a caption about how I was hoping my hand mixer holds up to the amount of baking I was planning and a friend said I could always ask for a stand mixer for xmas. I told her I already had one but with doubling and tripling recipes I doubted it could hold that much without having to make everything twice and then told me to check into airmiles to get one so I didn't have to pay for it. so I looked into it and what a joke. I didn't even have a third of the points you need to even pay part of it in cash! hahaha. so I started checking out how much it was on various websites and most had them on sale for 30% off + a $50 rebate. not wanting to wait til after completing all my baking to buy it for a little less on boxing day, I decided to buy it that night, lol. why wait the extra 2 weeks to save $50-100?  ; ) 

so I tried it out when I got home with it and it worked like a dream! I tried it out on a recipe I was doubling and it worked through it like nothing and cut my mixing time to just a couple minutes instead of 10-15 or more for a really thick dough. it also mixed up icing super fast. i'm gonna put it to the test this weekend when I make ginger sparkles since I had already made some of the thicker doughs before getting it. i also have 3 other things i want to make before i'm finished my baking, but now that I've decorated all the gingerbread and sugar cookies, it should be pretty quick, especially with my new toy : )