I am 47 and have baked with great success since I was a child. I always used a hand mixer or my vintage Sunbeam Mixmaster stand mixer. I had beautiful, fluffy cakes every time. Great cookies etc... Recently, I wanted to try baking my own bread, so it became necessary to buy a KitchenAid stand mixer. I can't bake a cake with this mixer to save my life. I thought I had lost my skills or constant bad luck or recipe choice. I stopped trying cakes from "baker's trauma". Ha ha ha Flat, dense, gummy...you name it. I thought I was an idiot because I now had the famous most popular mixer and couldn't make anything but bread. Reading this article has proven that I am over creaming and also over mixing the flour. I think it's a really easy mistake to make because these mixers are so powerful. I also have issues with how the ingredients stick to the paddle, the constant need to scrape the bowl even using the rubber edged paddle and my OCD need to mix well. :) Thanks for the excellent article, perhaps many of our failures are from too much power and our desire to mix well. Knowing when to stop is the trick I need to master with my new mixer.

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