SideSwipe original flex edge beater for KitchenAid mixers-6-Qt Bowl-Lift (Red, Most 6-QT, 7 QT, 5.5, 5Plus)

This thing is so good that not only is it the right tool for the job, but it makes the standard paddle attachment the WRONG tool. It will cut your creaming time for butter and sugar in half, not even counting stops for scraping the bowl. You just won't have to do that. When you get it, watch this work. It is actually kind of hypnotic, but also much better mixing device than the standard paddle attachment. Some of the other types of paddle replacements are just good at scraping the bowl. This one is INCREDIBLE at mixing, which is the real point of having a mixer in the first place.When to use it:1. Creaming butter and sugar for cookies and cakes.2. Mixing almost anything you would consider a batter rather than a dough and would have used the standard paddle attachment3. Cookie doughs - up to a point (see Tip #1 below)Advantages1. Better mixing in shorter time than the standard paddle attachment. No question. Compare the two when you get it.2. No scraping down the bowl.In my case for standard cookies, the creaming time went from 3 to 4 minutes with at least one stop for scraping the bowl, to 90 seconds complete and it was better creamed.Disadvantages1. Harder to scrape the vanes than standard paddle attachment, so more beater waste. (Hey, more to lick off the beater, if that is your kind of thing.)2. Can't be used to "power through" very cold butter or tougher items or doughs.3. It has a lifespan no matter how well you treat it. The silicone vanes will start to crack and come off after a while (years, if done right). Accept that fact. It's still worth it.Tips:1. Using chocolate chuck cookies as an example, use this SideSwide for the creaming the butter and sugar, eggs, and up to the point of adding half the flour. Then swap it out for the standard paddle attachment for the second half of the flour and the chunky stuff. Half the flour is usually the point it crosses the threshold from being a batter to being a dough. This will extend the life of your SideSwipe.1a. I must admit that when only using minichips, I don't bother swapping out for the standard paddle. Anything with standard chips or bigger, especially with nuts or chuck chocolate, I swap it out.2. As others have said, adjust the height of your mixer as needed.3. You may have to adjust the speed of this attachment in comparison to your paddle attachment. Try going slower by one click to start and see where that puts you. Adjust as needed.This is my third one. First one, I killed it with too cold butter and chunky stuff. My bad. Second one, I just made a whole lot of cookies and cakes with it. Lasted 3 years. I assume this one will do the same. I will gladly buy another one then.

The one thing that I really disliked with my bowl-lift Kitchenaid is that I had to unhook the beater and lower the bowl constantly in order to get a spatula in to get all of the ingredients off of the side of the bowl. I had looked at the BeaterBlade, but my mixer is a K5-a from the 70s and although the BeaterBlade claims to fit, it was too tight in the bowl and made the beater stick and slip as it tried to spin around the bowl. Kitchenaid makes their own spatula-type beater now, but not for the K5-a.I had seen a favorable video review of the Sideswipe and thought I might as well try it out. It fits the bowl nicely so it looked promising, even without ingredients. The first recipe I tried it with was a rather thick muffin batter and it worked very well. If you've seen the BeaterBlade in action you've probably seen that it keeps the sides of the bowl clean and pushes the ingredients to the center so that there's absolutely no bowl scraping necessary. The Sideswipe is a bit different in that the fins on the beater pull ingredients off of the bowl and incorporate them well, but it doesn't keep the side completely clean. To me this is not a problem because I still didn't have to scrape the bowl until I was done mixing and ready to pour the batter into muffin trays. It incorporated everything in about 5 minutes total, and normally I'd have to scrape the bowl 3 or 4 times to get everything worked in, stopping the mixer and unhooking the beater and lowering the bowl each time.One thing I especially like about the Sideswipe is that the fins let things like chocolate chips in the batter flow through the beater instead of forcing them underneath the spatula section. I don't know how the BeaterBlade would work in this regard, but it seemed like it was so tight in the bowl already that that might have been an issue. On the downside, because the Sideswipe is not one smooth spatula, cleaning it is a bit more difficult because each fin needs to be cleaned separately from the others. I don't have a dishwasher, but it seems like it would be a non-issue if you're not hand-washing the beater.Overall I'm very satisfied with the purchase, and I only wish I had ordered one sooner!