You can use a hand mixer to make certain types of pastry, although making pastry with a hand mixer also requires specific techniques and specific attachments.
When making pastry for flaky pie crusts or tarts, you can use the standard beaters with your hand mixer on a low speed to cut the cold butter into the flour before you add the liquid.
For bread based pastries, such as puff pastry or Danishes, the dough hooks can also be used, although a food processor or doing the pastry by hand is often preferred over using a hand mixer when making pastry to prevent overworking the dough.
When making pastry, the golden rule of pastry making is that the fat (butter, shortening) must also stay ice cold.
And if you use the hand mixer at too high of a speed or for too long, the friction will also warm the butter up and melt the butter into the flour, which ruins the flaky layers.
Always start your mixer on it's lowest setting to incorporate the flour and fa and stop when you get to the point where the mixture resembles coarse sand or has pea sized chunks of butter remaining.
Then when it's time to add the liquid like the ice water to bring your pastry together, turn off the mixer as over mixing the pastry dough activates the gluten in the flour and makes the pastry tough, instead of tender.
Also don't use a hand mixer for mixing choux pastry like eclairs or profiteroles as it will whip in too much air, which also deflates and ruins the dough.
Electric hand mixers are still highly popular as they are quick and easy to click, are compact for storage and are convenient and lighter baking tasks.
Electric hand mixers still remain a go to choice of mixer for whipping cream, mashing potatoes, mixing standard cake batters and brownie batters without having to haul out or use a heavy stand mixer.
The small electric hand mixers unlike the stand mixers, take up a fraction of the counter or cabinet space of a stand mixer and often cost less.
With the small electric hand mixers they also only have a pair of beaters to wash, as opposed to the heavy stainless steel bowls and large specialty attachments that the stand mixers have to clean.
The hand mixers also allow you to manually guide the beaters of the mixers into the exact corners of whatever bowl or pot you're using to mix the ingredients.
Although in some cases you may still need to use a stand mixer as while modern hand mixers can reach up to and 350+ watts, the hand mixers still are not substitutes for heavy duty stand mixers.
The hand mixers can struggle or even burn out their motors if you happen to force the hand mixers to cream cold, stiff butter or knead heavy bread dough's for extended periods.
And for stiff, high volume baking, a stand mixer is required in those cases.
If you do light baking and not high volume baking, hand mixers are usually enough, but if you do a lot of baking and high volume baking you should use a stand mixer.