A non-baked item post

All my posts so far have been of things I've made. I had a couple of things that I wanted to share that are baking related, but are not things that I've baked. First, the best item I've found in quite some time. It's called a beater blade. They make them for most major mixer models and this thing is awesome. I stumbled across it one day and decided I had to try it. This thing is cool because it has rubber fins on the sides of the beater attachment so it scrapes the bowl as it mixes. It works amazingly well. The only part of the bowl that you may have to scrape down is the part above wherever the beater blade comes into contact with the bowl. When you have to make a lot of icing, cookies or whatever, this thing is a major time saver. I have no affiliation with the company, nor am I sure who they even are, but I can't recommend this thing highly enough.

Next, I had a pouring shield for my mixer, which never worked quite as well as I would have liked. It kept in maybe 25-50% more of the stuff that tended to fly out of the bowl when you mixed, but it still allowed a lot to fly out. The inevitable mushroom cloud from when you make icing was still terrible. That, and the stupid little plastic clips that connect the two halves of the pouring shield break really easy. I did like being able to pour things in slowly down the little ramp, but it still made a bit of a mess.

Note: I took a quick picture without cleaning up the mixer. Note the massive layer of powdered sugar on it?

When I was making the wedding cake, I knew I would be making a LOT of icing and I didn't want to make a huge mess of the kitchen from the powdered sugar cloud, and I didn't want to inhale that much sugar either. (I could get all graphic and describe what it does to your nose after you breathe near a mixer while making about 10 batches of icing, but I won't. I think you can figure it out.)

After I make icing, bread, or whatever, I usually put a nifty bowl cover on the bowl to keep it from drying out. These are made by the company, and they work moderately well. They slip off rather easily because the lip just doesn't go down the sides quite far enough. They do stay on most of the time though. They have a little well in the middle so that you can put the bowl cover on, and still put it on the mixer's stand since the drive mechanism sticks down a bit below the bowl's sides.

When I was going to be making a whole bunch of icing, I needed a better solution than that terrible pouring shield, so I got an idea. I took a utility knife to one of my two bowl covers. I didn't know if it would work, but I needed to try. I cut off about half an inch from the middle well of one of the bowl covers, opening it up. I figured that if I cut up just high enough that the beater blade mounting post would just clear the bowl cover and I could leave the bowl cover on while I mixed, limiting the mess. I had to put the bowl cover on, then attach the beater blade to the post afterwards since the blade will obviously not fit through the hole from the top.

This was a HUGE success. After trying different means of mixing everything in the bowl by pouring some sugar in and mixing before adding the rest, I realized I could just dump it all in and go in one shot. The little bit of powder that came up through the center hole was negligible and I just let it run until it looks like everything mixed. I did have to scrape the top of the bowl sides since it is obviously going to throw powdered sugar everywhere in the enclosed space, but one scrape of that little area and the icing is done. Subsequently, on the baby shower cake, I had to make a icing and a whole bunch of fondant too. It worked equally as well for fondant with the bread hook. (I don't usually knead the fondant by hand if I can help it.) I may need to buy another set of bowl covers so I can have two again, but this was well worth scrapping out one bowl cover for a mixing shield that actually works. Granted, adding ingredients now means popping off the cover and adding it, but that is a trade off that I gladly make to keep the mess to a minimum. If there are not a lot of powdered ingredients in a recipe, I can still use the pouring shield, but for ones that tend to throw dust out everywhere, my new mixing shield is the only way to go.