I recently invested in a new hand blender and as I bake and cook a lot I decided to go for a Russell Hobbs rather than a Tesco's own (or equivalent) and was looking forward to having a bit more power at my disposal than I had previously had with my 10 year old and completely knackered model.

I actually bought mine from Argos and it was £16.99 in one of their sales (reduced from around the £24.99 mark), I notice you can buy it from Amazon for £17.99 at the moment.

Now in my opinion this blender is fantastic for some stuff and quite annoyingly awful for other things - it absolutely depends on what you are making and the reason for this is that although it claims to have 5 speeds it seems to me to have only fractional differences between the 5 - they are ALL super fast.

So, even on the very slowest speed making butter icing is virtually impossible without covering yourself in icing sugar. The first time this happened I actually ended up with most of the icing sugar in my hair and I was furious. It took forever to clean my kitchen. Since then I have had to mash the icing sugar into the butter with a fork before even contemplating switching on this blender and it is infuriating as butter icing is one of the things I make most often.

I am baffled by the power of the lowest speed setting on this hand blender. As you move the switch up through the (alleged) five speeds you can hardly hear or feel any difference, all five are just super super fast.

On the other hand, if you want to make meringue you can literally have amazing fluffy peaks in less than a minute because of the sheer power. Whipped cream is a doddle. Anything wet is pretty easy - although you do have to be careful still not to get covered in whatever you are blending - and deep bowls are preferable.

I have to say I do find this blender quite heavy to hold and it is definitely heavier than my old one, however, because I have to hold it for less time in general this is not too much of an issue.

The whisk blades come out very easy and the blender is very stylish to look at with the red and black panels, the lead is plenty long enough for what I need in the kitchen and it wipes clean very easily. My one big issue with this blender is the lack of a slow speed and it seems such a waste to have five speeds to switch between but none of them be a gentle beat.

So, on balance to be honest I am a bit disappointed in this hand blender and I don't think I would buy a Russell Hobbs again, I also wish I had read the Amazon reviews before purchasing this as they do seem a mixed bag with many people having the same issues as me. Just goes to show the value of doing your research first!