TikTok's Hand Mixer 'Hack' Is A Kitchen Mistake Waiting To Happen

Stand mixers are a coveted kitchen appliance, but as anyone who's ever contemplated buying one likely knows, they can be super expensive. Hand mixers, meanwhile, are a considerably cheaper and space-saving alternative that can tackle practically all of the jobs that a stand mixer can. The biggest downside of hand mixers is that you lose the luxury of keeping both hands free, since you have to hold onto both the mixer and bowl the entire time you're using it — or do you?

TikTok user @mattadlard seemingly found a way around this, as they demonstrated in a video from April 2024. In the clip, they place their hand mixer's beaters inside of the bowl, but instead of holding onto the mixer while it's running, they rest its back end on the countertop, allowing the beaters to mix the bowl's contents in a spectacular, hands-free fashion. "Work smarter not harder," the video's overlaid text reads — though you don't need to be a genius to realize that this "hack" is actually just an accident waiting to happen.

Right off of the bat, this method poses a problem for those with corded hand mixers, as the cord would make it nearly impossible to balance the gadget on the counter. There is, however, an even bigger issue with this seemingly ingenious idea: The bowl will almost certainly topple over.

TikTok user @mattadlard may have successfully used their hand mixer hands-free, but it's unlikely that everybody will have this same luck. As seen in the TikTok creator's on-screen demonstration, balancing the mixer on the counter makes the bowl lean over to one side, putting it in a seriously precarious position that commenters couldn't overlook. "The chances [are] that the hand mixer will move on its own causing the whole bowl to spill," one person commented, while another said that @mattadlard was "playing with fire."

Another commenter confessed that they didn't trust themself enough to properly pull off the hack, to which the creator responded that they still had to "keep a CLOSE eye" on the bowl as they let the hand mixer do its thing. This, then, begs the question: Is this "hack" even worth attempting in the first place?

Given that there seems to be serious potential for this to turn into a massive mess, we don't think we'll be adding this to our list of game-changing TikTok food hacks — though that doesn't mean the dream of a hands-free hand mixer is totally lost. As another TikTok user discovered in 2023, a cooling rack is all you need to turn your hand mixer into a stand mixer; just place the rack on top of your bowl and thread the beaters through it before attaching them to the machine.