You can’t deprive a woman the Joy of Baking for five straight days – during school holidays no less – and then expect her to just settle for some replacement with a 600 watt motor and no dough hook. You just can’t do it. It’s like taking a starving man to the All You Can Eat Buffet night at the local Sizzler and expect him to just have the complimentary bread and butter. It’s downright cruel.
The saleswoman at the local Electrical Bargain Warehouse Place Thing understood me. She could see where I was coming from – and indeed, as some might say, she could see me coming and from a mile off at that. As good salespeople often do, she spoke my language. She knew instantly that I was at the Extreme Sports end of baking. That I couldn’t settle for mere balloon whisks. That I needed a hook to mix dough and another one to cut butter into flour. That’s right: butter into flour. Perhaps even shortening into strong white flour. There, I said it. Live with it.
She led me gently away from the 600w model and showed me an 800 watt Kenwood model that came with a free Mincer attachment. I think I might have snarled at this point “What am I going to do with a mincer? Can you put flour, sugar, butter and eggs through a mincer?” And it was then she knew to lead me around the corner to what my friend KC later labelled “The Sealed Section” of the mixer department. And it was there that she showed me the Kenwood Chef KM002b.
Oh, baby how that thing gleamed in the striplighting of the store. And then I saw the price tag and my soaring heart plummeted.
Listen, finances have been bad: we’ve been haemmoraging money for a while now because of the hidden lawyers and financial advice fees required by the bank to seal the deal on our investment property (see “Sold (Out)“). One place even wanted to charge us $2500 for financial advice. Now, if I were our financial advisor looking at our current financial situation, I’d advise us to not seek any financial advice because we simply Can’t Afford to spend $2500 on it. But where that would leave us all, I do not know. Especially since I don’t know how ethical it is to be giving financial advice to yourself in the first place. But I digress.
So I found myself standing in front of the Dogs Bollocks of Mixers, knowing that its purchase would mean both a full heart and a full credit card.
My husband, a far more spontaneous creature than I, looked me in the eye. “Do you want it?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Do you really really want it?” he repeated, with a little more force.
“Yes!” I shouted.
“How much do you want it?” he shouted back.
“I really really really REALLY want it!” I replied. My heart was thumping, my adrenaline was pumping, I could have hurled myself down the track with my steel-sprung legs and won any race at that moment. But instead, I just whipped out my credit card and bought the thing. Yes, I bought it.
In the end, thanks to have some careful negotiation and a $100 cash-back voucher from Kenwood, we ended up spending $300 more than we had initially intended but $320 less than the RRP of the model we bought. So my financial advice to myself would be to chill: we saved more than we overspent. And surely, that’s a good thing.
In the meantime, the NDM has come back to baking. And that really is a good thing. Cue: cupcakes. Cue: open-faced peach and custard tarts. Cue: brownies with cherries and coconut. Cue: Butter. Sugar. Flour. Eggs. Bake, NDM. Bake like the wind!
