Kenwood Titanium Chef Baker review: an excellent stand mixer for home bakers

Whether you’re learning to bake, or you’re already the go-to person amongst friends and family for brilliant birthday cakes, a good stand mixer will be your best friend. It might be an investment, but one of these appliances will save you time, not to mention arm ache.

The Kenwood Titanium Chef Baker is one of the latest stand mixers launched by the brand. After almost 80 years, Kenwood's stand mixers have established a long-held reputation of being well-built and durable.

With innovative built-in weighing scales, this is a stand mixer that offers something different. It’s not the cheapest you can buy, but it’s by no means at the most expensive end of the scale either. So I tried it in my own kitchen for a week, to see if it was up to the task of tackling everyday home baking recipes.

Specifications

Who would it suit?

This is perfect for any home baker who wants a helping hand with mixing up cake batters, bread doughs, and whisking cream or egg whites. Even better, the integrated scales reduce the number of extra dishes to wash, which is always one of the pitfalls of baking.

The subtle white design is ideal for those looking for a mixer that doesn’t stand out. But it won’t suit those who want a mixer that makes a statement with a bold pop of color.

Unboxing

When unboxing the mixer, I was pleased to find it packaged in fully recyclable cardboard packaging. There’s not really any setup to do, the bowl and accessories need a wash before use, but that’s it really.

The mixer comes with three mixing accessories, the K Beater is ideal for making cakes, cookies, pastry, and frosting. The whisk is perfect for cream, batters, and eggs. Meanwhile, the dough hook is for mixing heavy dough like bread dough.

The final accessory is the splashguard, a plastic lid that fixes to the top of the mixer and allows you to mix in flour and powdered sugar without creating a cloud that covers the kitchen. It has a flip-up section so you can add ingredients easily while mixing.

The white appearance is inoffensive and blends into my white tiled backsplash, it’s not a statement mixer like a classic KitchenAid. But if you do feel the need for a pop of color, the top cover can be changed and is available in several muted colors, allowing you to customize the appearance to suit the style of your kitchen.

What is it like to use?

The accessories twist into position so they’re secure once attached to the mixer. Likewise, the mixing bowl also twists into place to lock it in position. The mixing bowl is a robust stainless steel but it lacks handles for lifting, which will be off-putting for some people.

The integrated weighing scales are one of my favorite features. There’s no need to dirty other bowls and dishes, instead, ingredients can be weighed as you add them to the mixer. It conveniently converts from grams to ounces via the kg/lb button. Plus you can zero it between ingredients.

When mixing, the display screen switches from showing weights, into a count-up timer. This is helpful if you’re new to baking and a recipe has advised that something should be mixed for a specific time.

There are six numbered speeds as well as a slow fold function to choose from on the chunky speed dial. But since it’s electronic, the speed increases gradually as the dial is moved and the range of speeds is not limited to the numbers listed.

Test 1: cake mix and frosting

The K Beater is the one that’s made for all the general mixing jobs, including cake batter. Unlike some Kenwood mixers, this model doesn’t come with a creaming beater, so I used the K Beater to cream together butter and sugar. It still does a great job, but you have to scrape down the bowl multiple times during this stage, to ensure the butter and sugar mix well into a pale fluffy consistency.

Despite using soft, room temperature butter, the mixer wobbled more than I would expect during the initial process of creaming the butter and sugar together. Once they were nicely mixed it settled down. And it coped well when I added in the eggs, and later, the flour.

The cake batter was well mixed and nicely aerated. It baked well into a beautifully fluffy and light coffee and walnut cake. I then used the mixer to make the coffee buttercream frosting.

Before attempting frosting, I attached the splashguard, so that I wouldn't accidentally send a cloud of powdered sugar into the air if I was a bit too enthusiastic with the speed. Once again I used the K Beater to whip up the butter before adding the powdered sugar bit by bit.

I made use of the integrated scales to weigh the sugar in as I went, which was super handy. It’s worth noting that you can’t use the scales while it’s running, which makes sense for accurate weighing.

Each time I added more sugar, I used the slowest speed, which is the fold function. This gently mixed it in without sending any flying around the bowl. Once each batch of sugar was mixed in, I increased the speed to whip the frosting. At the end I had a delicious light and airy coffee buttercream frosting, with minimal mess and minimal effort.

Test 2: meringue

To test out the whisk I followed a six egg white meringue recipe. First I whisked the egg whites until light and fluffy, then I added the sugar bit by bit. This time though, since I needed to add the sugar while whisking, I couldn't make use of the integrated scales to weigh it.

However, my recipe stated very specific timings. Once all the sugar had been added, I needed to continue whisking for 7-8 minutes. And this is where the count up timer came in super handy, it was easy to keep an eye on how long it had been whisking, without having to set a separate timer on my phone.

The whisk worked very well to whisk the meringue mixture and incorporate all the sugar. When I spooned it out onto my baking sheets, there was no unmixed sugar lurking in the base of the bowl. Happily, the meringue baked well and the mixer saved me from getting an arm ache using an electric hand whisk.

Test 3: bread

I made Indian naan bread dough using the dough hook to mix and knead the dough. It was a total of about 1.2lb of bread dough. The mixer coped well, it didn’t wobble much and it mixed the ingredients well. The dough was well kneaded and rose perfectly.

I used the scales again to weigh the ingredients. I had assumed that the scales were weighing what was in the bowl only, and that if any dough dropped from the hook while I was mid-way through weighing in some seeds, that it would mess up the weight.

But through some clever wizardry, the dough on the hook is accounted for, so if it falls off into the bowl, this doesn’t affect the weight shown on the display. This blew my mind. And while it’s a small detail, it’s not insignificant.

Cleaning

The bowl, tools, and the splashguard are all dishwasher friendly. I washed them by hand as well as in the dishwasher and had no issues getting everything clean. The main body of the mixer is easy to wipe clean and despite being white, stayed looking clean and fresh for the week that I had it on my counter.

How does it rate online?

The Kenwood is certainly a market-leading stand mixer. With 25 optional attachments available to purchase separately, there’s plenty of scope to customize this appliance and create a truly multi-functional kitchen machine. I found plenty of reviewers who use these attachments and say that they're really effective, the blender and spiraliser get some of the most frequent mentions.

There aren't many criticisms for the Kenwood Titanium Chef Baker aside from the fact that it's more expensive than other models and could be potentially tricky to blend into your kitchen decor. 

How does it compare?

If you’re looking for a statement stand mixer, the KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer has to be one of the most iconic around. Not only is it currently top of our best stand mixer list, but this American-made kitchen appliance comes in a huge range of colors that mean it’ll bring joy to your countertops. It’s a great all-rounder with a comparable price and capacity.

Alternatively, if you need something a bit more budget friendly, the Cuisinart Precision Strand Mixer offers value for money but doesn’t compromise and style or substance. It’s a good option if you’re not ready to invest double the money on a Kenwood or KitchenAid mixer.

Should you buy it?

The Kenwood Titanium Chef Baker is a reliable mixer and aside from being a little wobbly when creaming butter and sugar, I couldn’t really fault its performance. The capacity is ideal for most home baking recipes, but if you’re looking to batch bake or make multiple tiered cakes, it might be worth looking at sizing up to the bigger model.

The appearance and style will suit those looking for a mixer that doesn’t stand out. It’s simple to use and well designed. Moreover, with plenty of additional accessory options, there’s the opportunity to add to it and turn it into a real kitchen workhorse.

For me, the integrated weighing scale is the feature I’ll miss most when I have to go back to my usual mixer. It’s a really useful addition to the appliance and is most certainly not a gimmick.

How we test

Helen is one of our expert testers. She has a background in Home Economics, and as such food and cooking form the backbone of her varied 20-year career.

She had the Kenwood Titanium Chef Baker on loan for a week and during that time she kept it on her kitchen counter in her own home. She made use of all of the accessories and speeds to see how it performed for general home baking tasks.

Helen used the K-beater to make a cake mix and frosting. She was looking for well mixed batters without any lumps or bubbles. A good batter or frosting is light and fluffy, made in a matter of seconds.

She then used the whisk to make meringues. When doing this, she looked for stiff peaks that, when lifted, could hold themselves up. We don't want them to be too powerful because they can overmix egg whites and cream, but they still need to be powerful enough to make these quickly.

Our final test for stand mixers is on bread dough. Again, the machine needs enough power to work through springy, elastic dough. We don't want any flour left at the bottom of the bowl and all the ingredients to be well-integrated throughout the dough.

We also make notes on cleaning, aesthetics, storage and maintenance, so that you get the full picture of the stand mixer and how it performs.