Photo illustration: The Globe and Mail. Source Images: iStock

Gabrielle Drolet is a journalist and cartoonist based in Montreal. Stand Mixer For Baking

Some of my earliest memories involve sitting in the grass with friends at recess, describing what my life might look like when I became an adult. I was obsessed with this theoretical future version of myself: I imagined the big house I’d own, the garden I’d tend, the unlimited horses I might ride on any whim. While other children’s fantasies involved dragons and knights, I was more preoccupied with the specifics of my own future.

Many people grow out of this kind of thinking as they get older. Instead, I just got better at it. In high school, I could spend hours describing my dream apartment, drawing largely on what I’d seen in movies and read in books. I imagined I’d live in a downtown New York loft complete with exposed brick, a huge writing desk and a small scruffy dog. I edited this fantasy over time, adding details such as bay windows or a velvet couch – and, eventually, a pistachio green KitchenAid stand mixer.

For the uninitiated, stand mixers are kitchen appliances that, unsurprisingly, stand on your countertop and mix things for you: batter, icing, dough. Their main purpose is to make baking a little easier, eliminating the strain of kneading by hand or using a hand mixer. I’d argue their second purpose is to look beautiful on a countertop. The sleek and classic machine serves as a sort of status symbol for those serious about baking.

You’ve likely seen stand mixers before; they can be found in many well-appointed kitchens and on the set of just about any cooking show, which is where I first discovered them. In university, as I started cooking more often, I spent hours watching YouTube videos from the Bon Appétit test kitchen, where stand mixers often make an appearance, and even more time watching The Great British Bake Off, where a pastel mixer graces every baker’s bench.

A stand mixer is, like many appliances, more of a luxury than a necessity: Though it’s nice to have, you can get by without it. Adding to its luxury status is its cost, with new mixers from KitchenAid retailing for upward of $475. And so, a stand mixer was added to the list of things I dreamed of owning, though I didn’t think I ever would.

In early 2021, I developed a nerve condition that would become chronic and disabling. It manifests as pain and numbness throughout my upper body, particularly my hands. At its worst, I struggle to perform everyday tasks such as typing or chopping vegetables. At its best, I can do these tasks with varying degrees of pain and discomfort, meaning I often avoid them when I can.

In the two years since this started, I’ve found accessible tools and alternatives that make my life easier. My home is full of little gadgets I’ve come to rely on such as an electric can opener, a food chopper, compression gloves and an ergonomic mouse. However, living comfortably has required bigger purchases, too. As daily tasks such as cleaning and working became difficult, many of the luxuries I’d long dreamt of were suddenly crucial. Now, at 24, the biggest investments I’ve made for my living space have been practical ones: things such as a dishwasher and an office chair so pricey it made my eyes water. While my friends saved and started paying back their student loans in earnest, I focused more on making my life as painless as possible.

As disability shaped every part of my life, I had to re-evaluate my relationship with baking. I’d been a casual baker for years, making a loaf or cookies every few weeks and ramping up around the holidays. Suddenly, this became more complicated. While I found workarounds for many of the steps in the baking process, kneading and mixing remained insurmountable obstacles. Even electric hand mixers were too uncomfortable to use, causing pain in my hands and arms that might last for hours. Like so many other things, the KitchenAid suddenly transitioned from a frivolous luxury – a distant dream I could aspire toward – to something that would make a meaningful difference for me. However, as I outfitted my home with other luxuries-turned-accessibility-tools, the KitchenAid remained too hard to justify. I needed an office chair so I could sit and write for eight hours a day – I didn’t need to bake. And so, I didn’t. For two years, I barely baked at all, sparing myself the pain and discomfort.

The KitchenAid is just one example of the unseen cost of disability, sometimes referred to as “crip tax.” When you become disabled or chronically ill, there are a bunch of obvious costs that follow: the cost of seeing health care specialists, of medication, of taking days off when you simply can’t work. But there are also other, less obvious costs, like the KitchenAid. These costs have been the source of an immense amount of frustration and stress, but also of grief as they’ve kept me from the things I love. Baking has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. As a kid, my mom and I would make ginger molasses and Toblerone shortbread cookies every December, putting them in a cookie tin that would be empty within a day or two. These recipes followed me into adulthood – year after year, I delighted in making countless batches to share with friends, every step committed to memory.

Last Christmas I only baked once. I was left in so much pain that I knew it wouldn’t be worth doing again. While my holidays had largely revolved around baking for years, I had to accept that they just couldn’t any more. As I longed for the days when I could bake comfortably – for the immense amount of joy derived from a dusting of flour on the countertop and the smell of warm butter in my apartment – I also struggled with knowing exactly what could help.

I slowly came to terms with the fact that baking wouldn’t really be a part of my life any more. Baking is a small thing, but still – something I was sad to have lost. Then, a few months ago, a cruel thing happened. As I started to write more about the intersection of cooking and accessibility for work, algorithms picked up on my research and decided to taunt me. Whenever I opened Instagram, I was suddenly greeted with bright, unrelenting ads promoting stand mixers.

I decided to finally do something about it. Still unwilling to justify the price tag myself, I thought about other ways to fund it.

I e-mailed my editor at The Globe and Mail, hoping to twist his arm into buying me a stand mixer – or at least paying me to write about it: “I’ve long dreamt of owning this appliance, and now it’s an accessibility tool. Wouldn’t it be funny if I wrote an essay about it, which funded the purchase of my stand mixer?”

Minutes after he responded yes, I added the stand mixer of my dreams to my virtual cart and hit purchase.

A few weeks ago, I sat on the floor of my apartment and stared at the words “out for delivery” on my phone. Minutes later, I felt giddy when the doorbell rang and a delivery man carried the comically large box into my apartment.

“It’s here,” I texted my friends. “I can’t believe it.”

When I finally pried it out of the box and lugged it onto my kitchen counter, I felt flooded with joy and relief. After years of pining for this mixer, it was surreal to have it here in front of me: sleek, beautiful and pistachio green. And in the few times I’ve baked since, it’s made me happier than I ever could have imagined.

The first thing I baked was a batch of Toblerone shortbread cookies, the ingredients already stocked in my kitchen. I tossed butter and sugar into the mixer’s metal bowl and marvelled as they were beaten together, my hands spared the effort. And when I took the finished cookies out of the oven, their sweet and familiar smell wafting through my apartment for the first time in a year, I felt overwhelmed by how easy it was – by how big of a difference the appliance had made. I gave the cookies to friends in the coming days, excited to finally be able to bake for others again.

The stand mixer now lives on my countertop, as I imagined it would for more than six years. In the lead-up to Christmas I’ve been using it more than usual, leaning on familiar recipes and trying new ones that I hadn’t been able to before. With less pain in my hands, it’s been wonderful to be able to fill – and empty – cookie tins again.

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