Don't waste your money

I put a Kitchen-aid stand mixer on my wedding registry as my mom has had one for years and it is a dream to use... What I got from a well-intentioned relative was this mixer instead. Unfortunately, they did not include a gift receipt so I couldn't take it back to the store. So, I figured I might as well use it.

What a worthless product. The beaters do not reach the bottom of the bowl, or the edges either. It has a little feature to move the bowl back and forth on the stand, but that doesn't really work well either. I have to spend most of the mixing time scraping batter off the sides of the bowl into the beaters. That itself presents a problem, as the beaters are so close together that food gets stuck between them, thus 'gumming up' the beaters. The motor has so little power that it overheated and I could smell the burning motor while mixing cake batter-- not exactly a difficult item for most mixers... I tried to make my husband's favorite gingerbread cookies, and that didn't work at all. The beaters ground to a halt within seconds. I ended up mixing the dough by hand. Tonight I tried to make a pound cake to take to an ill friend. I mixed that by hand, too, after the motor got hot, stank up the kitchen, and the beaters got too slow to do much mixing at all. I've given up on it, and will be buying a Kitchen-Aid for myself as a Christmas present. Yes, this mixer is cheap, but you might as well put that money toward a better product in the first place, because you won't like this mixer at all. Aside from its amazingly poor performance, the glass bowl is very heavy and awkward to hold to pour or mix batter. The mixer body is cheap plastic and it has already cracked in one spot on the housing. It is awkward to remove the mixer from the stand for use as a hand mixer, and the item is difficult to clean.