We received our KitchenAid Artisan 5KSM175PS Stand Mixer on Thursday 6 December 2018, purchased via eCookShop (part of Dawsons Department Store).
Once I received the mixer I made sure to register it with KitchenAid. Make sure to do the same, then you gain access to their recipe section. Here you can find recipes for every season, such as dried cherry pistachio and Szechuan biscotti, vanilla bean cheesecake, the perfect Manhattan cheesecake and New York cheesecake among many others. Can you tell that I like the sweet things in life!
Of course we tested it straight away by baking a loaf, croissants and since then more loaves. But we had problems with them not raising enough to produce anything remotely like we wanted. A change of flour and a tweak of the height of the mixing head and things changed immensely.
We have made a large number of loaves and sweet things since then and so far it has performed very well. It really speeds up the preparation of the raw batters for cakes and biscuits a great deal. The first time I made biscuit dough in it, I marvelled at how much quicker, smoother and easier it was to produce a really lovely dough. I used a kidney shaped silicon scraper to pull the residual dough off the sides of the mixing bowl onto my wrapping film and it formed a lovely ball, ready for chilling in the refrigerator.
Once our bread dough was made we then shaped it to whatever we were going to bake:- pizza, French baton, artisan basket loaf, flatbread, etc. Then it went into a proving box until risen and on to the oven for baking. Please note that for ‘we’ you should substitute my husband, as I do not do food items (in the main) due to the tendency to wander off and forget what I was doing!
It does whisk eggs very well and it mixes cakes quite well. It does bounce around a bit and the knob for the accessories on the front will come undone if you don't check it periodically.
A point to note about the height of the mixing head, it may have been set at the factory, but you do still need to check it to ensure that it is at the correct height once you start using it in the home. The instruction booklet does mention this so it is not unexpected.
We did have an issue with the dough hook, which shed a small area of its finish and had to be replaced under warranty for us. Another good reason to make sure that you register your new machine.
