The attachment that you use to make cake is the flat beater or paddle attachment when making cake batters and cake frosting.
The flat beater or paddle attachment, creams the butter and sugar to perfection and mixes the heavy batters without incorporating too much excess air and gives you a nice, dense and moist crumb.
The flat beater or paddle is the best attachment for mixing standard cake batters, frostings as well as cookie dough , because it evenly incorporates the ingredients while also creaming the sugar and butter together.
The dough hook, is strictly meant for kneading yeast based dough, like bread or cinnamon roll dough.
The wire whip or whisk attachment is best for adding air to lighter mixtures, such as egg whites for meringue, whipped cream or even light glazes, although you shouldn't use the wire whisk for heavy cake batters as it can be damaged by thick dough.
And the flex edge beater is a variation of the flat beater with a silicone edge that continuously scrapes the sides of the mixing bowl as it mixes, which saves you from having to stop and scrap with a spatula.
A flat beater for a mixer is used for normal to heavy mixtures, including baking and savory dishes.
The flat beater for a mixer acts like a high speed wooden spoon to thoroughly combine cream, mash or shred ingredients and is your standard mixer's versatile, multi purpose tool or beater for the normal to heavy mixtures.
Flat beaters when mixing ingredients are commonly used for mixes, baking and savory dishes.
For baking, the flat beater is commonly used for creaming butte rand sugar and mixing cake batters as well as making cookie dough and folding in additions such as nuts or chocolate chips.
For savory dishes, the flat beater of a mixer is commonly used for mashing boiled potatoes, shredding cooked chicken or pork and mixing ingredients for meatballs or meatloaf.
And for mixes, the flat beater is commonly used for blending frostings, glazes and thick dips.
You should always use the flat beater for your mixer at low to medium speeds, of 1 to 6 speeds for best control.
A flat beater can also be used instead of a dough hook, although only for the initial mixing stage for the bread dough to bring the flour and liquid together.
But you should not use the flat beater to fully knead the bread dough.
For the initial mix of the bread dough, you can use the flat beater on speed 1 or 2, just to combine the ingredients into a shaggy dough.
The flat beater works good for this initial stage of bread dough mixing, as the dough hook is not designed to mix the loose flour and water efficiently.
The flat beater does an excellent job of bringing the mixture together very quickly.
Then for the kneading stage of the bread dough, switch to the dough hook and knead the bread dough on speed 2 only.
You want to only run the mixer on speed 2 when kneading the bread dough as using higher speeds or using a flat beater to knead the bread dough can cause the mixers motor to overheat or cause the dough to climb up the attachment into the mixer head.
The hook stretches and folds the gluten in the bread dough without overworking the machine.
Although if you don't have a dough hook attachment, don't force the flat beater to do the kneading.
Instead, use the flat beater for the initial mixing of the bread dough and then finish kneading the dough by hand on a lightly floured surface for between 5 minutes to 10 minutes.