With my wife’s 60th birthday approaching rapidly, I was looking for something special to buy her. Special, to my wife, means something that she really wanted but not necessarily something that she really needed. This year I will get her something that she really wants and something she really needs, a new stand mixer. My wife loves to bake and she bakes something five days out of every seven. I’m not really into cookies, cakes, or cupcakes and she’s not supposed to eat them because of her diabetes. Fortunately, all the neighborhood kids adore her and love her sweets. Anyway, when I was offered the KitchenAid 90th-anniversary stand mixer at a discount through one of the cooking clubs that I belong to, my search for the perfect gift came to a halt.
KitchenAid designed the first stand mixer for the home kitchen in 1919 and was a cut-down version of the Model H 80-quart stand mixer invented by Herbert Johnson in 1914. Their initial model, H-5, was a food-processing workhorse offering a wide range of attachments that handled everything from mixing dough to slicing and straining meat products. The modern version offers even more attachments to handle and an even wider range of tasks: pasta-making and sausage stuffing to ice cream making are all tasks easily handled by the KitchenAid stand mixer equipped with the right attachment.
The 90th-anniversary model of the famous KitchenAid stand mixer of 1919 is an appliance that a homemaker will be proud to display on her kitchen counter, finished in a Candy-Apple Red, much like the candy-apple red metallic finish used on expensive classic car. It will be a focal point of attention and admiration. A 10-speed mixer that can handle every task given it, the cook and baker in the family will find new ways to use it. Its tilt- back head makes changing attachments and accessing the glass mixing bowl a snap. It comes with a flat beater, dough hook and wire whip. Unlike the original, the glass mixing bowl, with it’s large handle, is graduated, and doubles as a 5-quart measuring cup.
Like its predecessor, this appliance is hand-assembled in Ohio by workers who take great pride in producing quality kitchen appliances for the home. The 90th-anniversary KitchenAid stand mixer is economical to operate as well, using a mere 325 watts. KitchenAid doesn’t make cheap appliances, quality-wise or price wise; and at $349.95 plus shipping and handling, this beautifully hand-crafted mixer is no exception. The way I looked at it, when buying an appliance, quality is more important than price. In the end, cheap mixers will cost you more because you will be replacing it on a regular basis. This mixer will last you a lifetime with the proper care. Now, all I have to do is keep it hidden from my wife until her birthday, October 30th.
