My old kitchen mixer conked out recently, leaving me in a quandary with a pile of half-whipped brownie mix. Still in my pinny, I dashed down to my local supermarket looking for a replacement, and grabbed this product to finish the job.

Unfortunately, my impulse buy did not prove to be a particularly wise one. On the upside, this 200W beater has plenty of power. Whereas my old beater took about 6 minutes to get the eggs for the mix to a reasonably stiff state, this one does it in three. There are five speed settings too, which sounds quite impressive - but the problem is that they're not really very well calibrated so the bottom speed isn't much slower than the top one. The result? The time saving fast beating comes at a cost, namely the festooning of all kitchen surfaces in the vicinity with small pieces of egg. I simply couldn't find a slow enough speed on the machine to prevent splash - and I didn't even dare try the turbo setting. Also, the bowl underneath the mixer got pretty badly punished. I'm glad I was just using an old glass thing, and I wouldn't want to try this with a posher, prettier receptacle.

This also means that the body of the appliance tends to get a bit coated - it needs constant wiping. 'm not a big fan of white mixers with holes in them to ventilate the motor - in my experience, flour and cocoa tend to fly up and clog them up, meaning that the beater either looks horribly dirty or you have to spend ages with a cotton bud cleaning it.

On the other hand, the machine beats smoothly and consistently and it's not that noisy. The chrome beaters are easy to remove and clean, as are the dough hooks. However, the slightly odd shape of the latter means they don't work nearly as well as my standard Kenwood food processor when it comes to kneading and bullying that dough. Given that it cost me about £10, I am satisfied with its performance - it does a good job, and if you're not a madly keen cook and just want to beat the odd cake mix a couple of times a year, it'll see you just fine. In future, though, I'll learn my lesson: shell out a bit more cash if you want to ensure your dough is looked after!