If loving my Kitchen Aide stand mixer is wrong, I don’t want to be right. Of all the appliances in my kitchen this is the one I would mourn and bury if it ever died. Then I would buy a new one faster than a cup of coffee cooling in a cold winter storm!
Seriously I don’t think I could manage without it. I probably use it once a day to quickly whip up a batch of cupcakes, mash bananas for banana bread or use it to mix my meatloaf so my hands don’t get all gooey.
My Kitchen Aide is getting pretty old and it’s nothing fancy. My mom and dad gave it to me for Christmas in about 1985. I was just a couple of years out of high school and setting up house. Growing up my mom did not have a mixer like this at home so I wasn’t sure how to use it. I kept it under the counter. It was heavy to haul it out so I really didn’t use it a whole lot. One weekend I was visiting my mom and I noticed she kept her Kitchen Aide right on the counter, easy access and much simpler than the hand mixer I’d been struggling with to make cookie dough. From then on this appliance has had center stage in my kitchen.
I recently hosted a community education night where 10 ladies each made a dozen of six different Christmas cookies to get a jump start on their holiday baking. Three hours, five ovens and 60 dozen cookies! (720 cookies to be exact.)
I pre-made enough dough at home to make 72 dozen cookies and then I baked two dozen of each kind at home as “practice.” (I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing when I got in front of a group of bakers.) It was just me and my Kitchen Aide for two days blending batch after batch of cookie dough. We became very close.
We had arguments where I was told, in no uncertain terms, if I added one more cup of flour it would spit it out all over the counter….I would add six and then cover the top with a dish towel and spoon feed the seventh in through a crack.
We had good times when the rich creamy butter blended sweetly with brown sugar and eggs and vanilla…a better combination cannot be found. In the end it was a union of love and more than 50 pounds of cookie dough.
I wonder how my great grandma Marion survived all those years of baking without a Kitchen Aide. She made tons of cookies at Christmas time but I only remember her making them by hand. She used a wooden spoon and a huge yellow glass bowl. I think now that she must have had incredible arm strength.
Maybe it was the sifting? I liked to sift the flour for her. Maybe that made a lighter, easier to stir cookie dough? All I know is I couldn’t do it myself. My kids would have gone without Grandma Moulton’s sugar cookies because my arms would have given out half way through the batch.
Between you and me, I have scoped out the new models of Kitchen Aide stand mixers. It feels like I’m cheating on my appliance. You know they say the grass is always greener but in this case it comes in 27 gorgeous colors! I am partial to Caviar Grey.
Until I smell the motor burning up, my mixer is safe in a loving home, center stage on my counter. Peace and enjoy the holiday season!
Think what a better world it
would be if we all, the whole
world, had cookies and milk
about three o’clock every
afternoon and then lay down
on our blankets for a nap.
Barbara Jordan
Taste of Home columnist Sandy (Anderson) Holthaus lives on a farm in South Haven, MN with her husband, Michael, and their children Zoe, Jack and Ben. Her heart remains on the North Shore where she grew up with her parents, Art and LaVonne Anderson of Schroeder. She enjoys writing about her childhood and mixes memories with delicious helpings of home-style recipes.
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