Under-worked Chef dies making Royal Icing

It was a close thing. Our brandy-soaked Christmas Cake, its homemade marzipan coat firmly in place, only needed icing.  Into the Kenwood Chef's cavernous bowl went egg whites, lemon juice, glucose and a little icing sugar. Faster and faster the beater whizzed around, the mixture began to thicken and we made ready to shovel more sugar into the frothing mass. Then disaster struck!

Smoke rose ominously from the Chef. The kitchen quickly filled with the acrid smell of dying electric motor and, before either of us could reach for the off switch, it ground to a halt.

Fortunately, we also have a hand-held electric whisk so, with kitchen windows wide open to flush out the fumes, the job was quickly completed.

Poor Kenwood Chef! He was 25 years old and had worked hard in his youth, helping to create cakes and buns every week for the family. More recently, though, he's spent most of his days in the dark recesses of a kitchen cupboard. Indeed, the last time he saw the light of day was November 2018, when I used him to make my 70th Birthday sponge cake, then last year's Christmas cake.

Shall we replace him? I was astonished to discover that Chefs now retail for about £300; that's a lot for a machine that will probably only be used once a year. Refurbished ones cost about half that amount, whilst 2nd-hand ones on eBay go for less than £100, but even that still seems a lot of money to spend on a little-used item.

Granny mixed all her cakes by hand, so I'm sure I could too, or might a hand-held mixer suffice – like the Kenwood Chefette with which we started our cake-scoffing married lives? We have about 11 months to make up our minds.