I almost killed my mixer

So in case you were wondering... I now own this bad boy:

It's a beauty, and it mixes like a dream.  I'm so happy!

I almost utterly destroyed it in its first week of life.

I wanted to make this bread, which I had made a few times in the bread machine.  It seriously makes the best toast of your life.  Of. your. life.  See this blog for an ode to the toast that this bread makes... I support her words 110%.  Now that is Toast.  I wanted to try it in the mixer, the way the recipe calls for it, since I wasn't sure I'd adapted it properly for the machine.

It's an incredibly thick dough, and the dough was just climbing up the dough hook.  The recipes says it should slap around the sides of the bowl without sticking... there was no slapping around the bowl because the dough wasn't even coming close to the sides.

And my poor mixer.  It was shaking the whole table and making some awful noises, and the top part (which locks) was unlocking itself and lifting up.  You're supposed to let it knead for 6 minutes, but I got so worried about my mixer that I stopped after probably only 3 minutes of intermittent kneading.

Turns out the directions for making bread in the mixer are back in the recipes section of the manual, not in the instructions section.  You're not supposed to knead bread on a setting higher than 2 (I was on, oh, 4 maybe?) and if the dough climbs up the dough hook you need to add more flour.  My bread turned out ok, but not as good as it had been in the bread machine.  Talk about disappointment.  All of this pining away for the mixer of my dreams, and the bread machine sitting in my mom's basement turns out to be better.

This is what it looked like in a previous, bread machine version:

The good news was that my mixer was not, after all, destroyed.  Thank goodness.  But I did immediately go online and register the product so that it's definitely under warranty!!

I dared to try it again this evening - it's in its second rise right now, and the mixing went great!  I kept it on a lower setting, and I also added flour in bit by bit so that it had some time to adjust.  I really think it all just takes some practice.

This loaf is a gift, so I will have to let my family and AK tell you how it is!  They are going to have to split it - it takes about 3.5 hours to make and I have choir tomorrow and Maundy Thursday services, which takes up all of the rest of my time before I see them.