Cahalan v. KitchenAid

Last week, I was excited to notice that the time had finally come for Brownie Cookies. Recipe No. 9 in the book, these bad boys caught my eye from my first skim through the contents. From the photo, it looked like they’d be thick, fudgy cookies with gooey peanut butter swirls — in other words, paradise.

Instead, they were…weird.

Now, weird doesn’t exactly mean “bad” in this instance. They tasted good, and if I closed my eyes and forgot what they were supposed to be like, they were a perfectly fine dessert to enjoy for the past few days. But from the assembly process to the final texture, there’s no way around the fact that these babies were odd.

One could assign various reasons for that. It’s possible I mis-measured something, or, in my distracted style of baking, left some key ingredient out altogether. It could even be my refusal to bake one tray at a time. But I have a hunch that the issues with these cookies lie with one simple fact: I neither own nor want a stand mixer.

I know, I know. This is blasphemy. But no, I have not forked over hundreds of dollars for a stirring machine, and I do not plan to do so. The “I don’t have one” part of this is understandable enough — my current kitchen has about six inches of total counter space, and additionally, I am poor. Even if that changed, though, I still believe that the KitchenAid would not be for me.

For starters, my kitchen’s small size is a feature, not a bug. I’m an unmarried woman partial to living alone, and as long as that remains the case, there is simply no reason (and, from a carbon footprint standpoint, no justification) for me to have a large home. I’d prefer not to have to banish my toaster to an end table outside my kitchen door — as, yes, I genuinely do right now — but, in general, I like my apartments small and efficient. A stand mixer makes sense in a giant granite-topped suburban kitchen, but in the kinds of places I want to live, it doesn’t.

And that should be okay! KitchenAids seem like a fine way to eliminate some of the harder labor of baking projects, but ultimately, they’re what the name says: an aid, not a necessity. I like to bake, but I’m not doing anything elaborate — and if a “home-baker-friendly” dish requires a stand mixer to be made effectively, I think the solution should be a more accommodating recipe, not a wider proliferation of tools too expensive and too large to fit into millions of home bakers’ kitchens.

This credo hadn’t yet led me astray in this project, but I think it may be the culprit behind the Brownie Cookies’ woes. The recipe asked me to whip eggs and sugar with the paddle attachment of a stand mixer until they’d doubled in volume, and, though I tried to replicate that with my boyfriend’s hand mixer (yup, I don’t own one of those myself either), I’m not sure it worked. The mixture only fluffed up by around a third, I’d say, and seemingly because of that, my final batter was incredibly thin. I didn’t think it would even make it onto the baking sheets!

I did manage to pour out cookie-like discs, but the finished product turned out very chewy — and, paradoxically, somehow very prone to disintegrating in my hands. The flavor was great, but everything else struggled. I’d popped the remaining batter in the fridge after the first trays went in the oven, and conveniently, that at least solved the pancake-thin consistency problem by firming the mixture up. Still, though, the second round of finished cookies wasn’t quite right.

So what do you think? Did my lack of stand mixer fail me with these? Are you a member of the KitchenAid cult who has some argument for me about how buying one will change my life? Go ahead and hit me with it. I’ll note it, ignore it, and see you here next time, for more cookies mixed with my own, space-saving hands.