The Best Hand Mixer

Mixing by hand can be a bit of a chore, leaving your arm sore and your meringue melty. A good hand mixer gives you the extra power you need to whip up your favorite frosting or a decadent cookie dough without breaking a sweat. After 20 hours spent whipping up four cakes, 16 dozen cookies, four batches of pizza dough, and several bowls of seven-minute frosting with four different hand mixers, we think that the Breville Handy Mix Scraper is the best hand mixer you can get. It churns through dense cookie doughs and quickly whips delicate batters and pillowy meringues, and comes with more useful attachments and features that cheaper mixers lack. Hand mixers are great tools for smaller recipes and don’t take up as much space as larger appliances, but if you’re a serious baker you may want to check out our guide to stand mixers .

The Breville Handy Mix Scraper was the best hand mixer we tested. With plenty of power and uniquely thoughtful features—like coated beaters that don’t rattle against bowls, the Breville produces excellent results and is a joy to use. This mixer was the most versatile one we tested. It can quickly switch between nine different speeds to handle a range of tasks like creaming butter, mixing chunky doughs, or gently folding batters without straining. Extra features—a timer, a pause button, and a light that shines into the bowl—save time and take some of the guesswork out of a high-stakes bake. The Breville was the easiest mixer to use and clean, with a handy quick-release for beaters and a snap-on storage case to neatly consolidate its attachments. We think it’s worth the relatively high cost for people who want the best results you can get short of using a stand mixer, but if you’re looking for a no-frills, affordable option for use every now and then, you may prefer our budget pick.

We like the Cuisinart Power Advantage Plus 9-Speed Hand Mixer for occasional baking and making smaller recipes. This little machine is an effective hand mixer that evenly blends cookie dough and quickly whips fluffy meringue. It has a nice range of speeds, but it’s not as powerful as the Breville and it’s fairly loud. It isn’t as easy to use as the Breville, because it lacks things like a light and a timer, but it can still churn through most recipes. Compared with other, less expensive models, it has more attachments and a handy storage case to keep all of its parts together.