KitchenAid 12" Convection Bake Digital Countertop Oven

I have to say, I didn't expect to be able to say this, but this product works just like a regular oven. That might not sound too impressive, but that is the most positive thing that I feel I could have ever possibly said about this product or one like it, it exceeds my expectations in every way. I live in a student apartment. I am a student, I like to cook for myself, and occasionally for friends. The oven in my apartment is an electric oven from the 80's, which is to say, it's unusable. I've gone for a year without being able to bake anything, and decided that I needed something. When my very cheap and boring slot toaster bit the dust, I decided to replace it with this. I didn't expect this to work as nicely as a good consumer oven. My parents re-did their kitchen after my younger sisters moved out to go to school, and they put in a very, very nice Thermador oven, which I had the pleasure of using extensively over thanksgiving. I was afraid that that oven had spoiled me. I've had toaster ovens before, I've tried to cook stuff other than toast and chicken fingers in them before, and they never did too well. They baked uneven, and couldn't maintain high baking temperatures for long enough. I read reviews for this and decided that if any toaster oven would work at all for baking it would be this one. The first thing I did after receiving this was plug it in and make some toast. I got a slice of bread, and put it on the rack. My first impression of the toaster was that the controls were super easy to use. I don't think they could have been made any simpler. For toast, set it to "Toast" mode, Select a darkness level from 1-8, and then click the selector knob in to switch to the number of slices you are toasting. Turn the knob to the desired number, in my case, 1, and then press the big start button. The toaster gives you a count down so you know exactly to the second when your breakfast will be done. Upon completion, the toaster gives three short beeps that I don't find to be annoying. I used 6 as a toast setting, it was just a little dark for my taste. I use 5 now, and that is about what I like. Toast is boring, what else have I tried? -Frozen Pizza. I had to. I found that a lot of pizzas available at the store are exactly 12" around and fit perfectly in the round pan included with the oven. I used the pizza setting which automatically sets the "frozen mode" on. The oven took 4 minutes and 30 seconds to get to the recommended temperature of 400F, and the pizza baked perfectly in the exactly correct amount of time. The bake was even, and crispy. Very happy. -Cornbread. With my pizza experiment having gone better than I expected (I genuinely expected that this wouldn't work well as an oven at all and I would end up returning it) I decided to try real, from scratch baking. I have a recipe for some killer cornbread, so I made it. I used the bake setting with convection on (I always have it on) The oven was set to 400 again. The cornbread took 23 minutes, which is exactly how long it usually takes in a normal oven. The top was golden brown, and the interior was cooked thoroughly. The crust was nice and flaky. Now I was very impressed. -Cookies. Cookies went quite the same as the cornbread, only with the oven set to 350. The oven takes four minutes almost on the nose to reach that temp. The cookies were done at exactly when the recipe said they should be, and they were really good. -A casserole. Now confident, I decided to attempt my families famous corned beef casserole recipe. The oven handled it flawlessly. To quote a famous fruit salesman, "It just works". I was very impressed -My last test was another pizza, but a real one this time. My friend who is also a good cook decided that this oven that I had been raving about for the past week couldn't possibly be able to make a real pizza from real dough and ingredients and get the dough crispy and so on. I said he was wrong. I constructed my pizza dough, spread it out in the included 12" round pan, and assembled my pizza on top of it. I preheated the oven to it's highest temp. My plan was to let the pizza sit on the lowest rack height for ten minutes, then move it up to the middle height for five, then move it up to the "Broil" height, the highest, for a couple minutes to finish it off. This plan worked out very well, and my crust was incredible. I was super impressed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This oven functionally exceeded my wildest expectations when it comes to performance, and I can't help but think that this is because of how well it seems to have been designed. Here are some of the really well designed aspects of this product: -The controls and User Interface. My area of study is software. I've taken a number of courses relating to UI, and I can't help but feel that the people who designed the controls nailed it on this one. For the number of control options provided, there is no simpler way to do it. The controls might seem complex, but they're not, they're really good. Their meaning is clear. -Quality parts. Nothing on this toaster feels cheap. The knobs are nice to turn. The buttons feel solid. The door hinges don't make noise or have stiff spots. The power cord is very sturdy. The baking racks are SOLID, I think I could drive over them and they'd be okay. With how solid these parts are, I can only imagine that the internals are solid too. -The toaster looks nice. This might be a weird thing to praise, but the toaster just looks really good. Thought clearly went in to it, and if thought was put in to appearance, then it stands to reason that thought was put in to other areas of design for this product as well. -The crumb tray. At first, I thought that this thing didn't have a crumb tray and that this was going to be a problem. I didn't realize it did have one until I picked up the oven to move it from the spot on the counter where I'd done the initial "toast test" to it's permanent home, next to my microwave. When I picked the oven up the tray slid part of the way out. The Crumb tray is located beneath the door, it's that thing that looks like an inch wide piece of trim below the door. That sides out, and attached is a crumb tray that covers the whole bottom of the oven. The crumb tray can be removed incredibly easily, and doesn't require awkwardly digging it out of the toast compartment like other toaster ovens that I have used. Other less significant but nice features: -Power cord is nice and long, no stubby cheap cord here. -Very well insulated handle -Cools down very fast after use, doesn't put out much heat while in use. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The only "complaint" I have is a minor gripe, because I can see why it was done this way. The handle sticks out and up over the top of the oven when the door is closed, so that the highest point on the oven is the handle, not the top of the toaster. The reason I think KitchenAid did this was so that the handle would be easy to grab when the door was open and laying on the counter, and people wouldn't be inclined to grab the hot oven door to close it. From a practicality standpoint this makes perfect sense, but from an aesthetics sense, it bothers me some, especially since the table I have the oven sitting on isn't deep enough for the handle to sit on the table when the door is open. Oh well. I'm probably in the minority for even caring about this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ For anyone who can't buy a real oven and is looking for something small(er) that will do anything a real oven could do withholding size issues, this thing is the answer. Someone, or a group of people, clearly put a lot, and I mean a lot, of effort in to the design of this product. Every little aspect of it is very, very well thought out and executed, and it's performance exceed my expectations in a way that I didn't think would be possible. The level of thought that went in to this is something you don't see a lot.