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So I don’t have a whisk or an electric whisk and a lot of baking recipes say to cream eggs and sugar and I used to do it with those tools.

Can I cream eggs and sugar with a manual egg beater (in picture below) or using a stick/immersion blender?

enter image description here

Anastasia Zendaya
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Amanda_C
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2 Answers2

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You have a whisk; the object in your picture is a whisk and you can use it to cream ingredients for your recipe. The gearing system makes it easier to get a high speed but you could even use a fork or a (totally manual) balloon whisk once the mixture is soft enough.

I would avoid using an immersion blender as it will be hard to get air into the mixture without careful technique; see this related question for more.

dbmag9
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    Technically the pictured object is not a whisk...but the difference between beaters and whisks is small enough not to matter in this case (and beaters may be superior if you forget to pre-soften your butter). – user3067860 May 17 '21 at 15:55
  • And a damp tea-towel will help to keep the bowl in place. – Andrew Morton May 17 '21 at 19:41
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You sure can use it, you will have to adjust your expectations on timeframes though.

Creaming cakes was done long before the existence of electric mixers. I have read (but never been courageous or masochistic enough to try it myself) that, by using a simple whisk moved by one's arm only, it took upwards of one hour of energetic whipping to achieve adequate creaming.

Your whip offers you a mechanical advantage over the simple whisk, so you should need some time between the time needed for manual creaming (1-2 hours) and the time needed by a modern mixer at highest speed (5-10 minutes). I cannot predict where in this interval it will fall, because I've only tried this mechanized type of whisk once, back when I wasn't experienced enough to notice how well it performs in comparison to other methods. Based on my experience with hand-whisking egg whites (with a simple nonmechanized whisk): before you start, ensure you have a backup whisker so you can change every 5-10 minutes, or however long it takes for your arm to get very tired.

rumtscho
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    It's even more important to pre-soften the butter (to room temperature) and pre-chop it into smallish chunks when doing this manually (unless you're really in it for the arm workout). – user3067860 May 17 '21 at 15:57
  • I'm not masochistic, nor a professional long distance whisker, but I'm always impressed with how a quick hand-whisk is. Under ]normal,ideal] circumstances I can beat 3-4 egg-whites faster with my favourite hand-whisk, than with a regular electric one. In this instance I would probably not bet on myself, maybe with a +3 handicap. – Captain Giraffe May 17 '21 at 18:34
  • @CaptainGiraffe then I must be doing something differently (either in whisking technique or in the amount of training I alot to my biceps) - with a hand whisk, if I want a nice French meringue and not just barely-formed-foam with no peaks yet, I need at least 15 to 20 minutes of vigorous whisking that gets me out of breath. – rumtscho May 17 '21 at 18:40