Specialty Appliances

REVIEW The Hamilton Beach HomeBaker is a bread maker that is easy to use and has a midrange price.

REVIEW The Aroma 5-Quart Food Steamer has a small capacity but good performance.

REVIEW The West Bend 41300 is a dual-blade bread maker that produces quality horizontal loaves.

REVIEW The West Bend Stir Crazy 82505 is a large-capacity popcorn maker which delivers perfect popcorn every time.

REVIEW If you’re looking for a bare-bones model and just cooking for one or two people, the NESCO 5-Quart food steamer is a good choice.

The Nostalgia Electrics 4-Quart Ice Cream Maker makes a gallon of ice cream, and for an ice cream maker its size, it is rather quiet. In fact, during testing, we were surprised at how much quieter it was than other ice cream makers we reviewed.

The attractive Aroma 4-Quart ice cream maker is charmingly old fashioned, with its appealing fir wood bucket and die-cast hand crank. If you get tired, you can switch to its electric motor.

Unlike old-fashioned machines, the Hamilton Beach 68320 ice cream maker uses a modern freezer bowl, which makes it faster and easier to use. All it takes is a flip of the switch to get going, and our testing showed it can make ice cream in about 40 minutes.

The minimal-fuss Cuisinart ICE-30BC Pure Indulgence is one of the best ice cream makers we tested. It takes only a little foresight to prepare ingredients and the freezer bowl to make fresh desserts, and we liked the machine’s large, sturdy base and non-slip feet.

The Oster FRSTIC-WDB-001's wooden bucket design makes it look like an old-fashioned ice cream maker, but it uses electricity. That way, you can enjoy the nostalgia without muscle strain from turning a hand crank.

The Chef’sChoice International Gourmet Egg Cooker 810 makes as many as seven eggs at one time, letting you cook them to different levels.

The Simple Taste Egg Cooker is simple to use and gives you eggs with very good taste, but our testing showed that even when we followed the included directions properly, we could not get hard-cooked eggs that were cooked completely through.

The Nordic Ware Egg Boiler lets you prepare soft- and hard-boiled eggs in your microwave in a compact, egg-shaped kitchen accessory. This egg cooker is dishwasher safe, so cleanup is simple. That said, we had less than stellar success making hard-cooked eggs with this kitchen appliance.

The Elite Cuisine EGC-007 Maxi-Matic cooks up to seven eggs at once and can make soft-, medium- or hard-boiled eggs, as well as an omelet or two poached eggs.

Editor’s Note: This product has been removed from our side-by-side comparison because it is no longer available.

You can cook up to six eggs inside the compact Dash Rapid Egg Cooker. In our tests, the hard-cooked eggs had thoroughly cooked yolks and firm whites, and they tasted great. You can also use this economical machine to make scrambled eggs, omelets or poached eggs.

When we tested the Cuisinart Egg Central CEC-10, we ended up with perfectly cooked hard-boiled eggs with great texture and taste. The yolks were cooked completely and displayed a pale yellow color, and they were somewhat crumbly.

Editor’s Note: This product has been removed from our side-by-side comparison because it is no longer available. You can still read our original review below, but Top Ten Reviews is no longer updating this product’s information.

The Great Northern Pop Frenzy 6255 is a 24-cup, hot oil popcorn popper with a nonstick surface and an automatic stirring rod that gently moves unpopped corn kernels around until they burst into popcorn.

Editor's Note: This review has been removed from our side-by-side comparison because it no longer ranks as a top 10 product. The original review is below, but check out our current top 10 about Donut Makers here.