The 4 Best KitchenAid Attachments of 2025

Top pick

You can make a couple servings of shaved ice in under 30 seconds with this attachment. It’s a bit of a splurge but great if you want a fun, easy treat for kids or if you like to entertain.

If you yearned for a Snoopy Sno-cone Machine as a child (or if you were disappointed by the clunky, laborious reality of using that device), the KitchenAid Shave Ice Attachment may finally fulfill your snow cone fantasies. It makes good shaved ice lightning fast, and you can also use it to make an instant granita with frozen juice or coffee.

To use the attachment, freeze 6 ounces of any liquid in each of the four included cylindrical molds. After choosing either the coarse or fine blade, pop a puck of ice out of its mold, insert it into the machine, and crank your mixer up to high. In less than 30 seconds, you’ll have a mound of shaved ice big enough to serve one or two people — about two cups total.

The fine blade is the one we’d choose most of the time. It shaves plain ice into a fluffy texture with a bit of crunch. The result is not as soft and snow-like as, say, Japanese kakigori, but it’s still pleasant to eat and soaks up syrup well. The coarse blade produces something a little too crunchy to be entirely pleasant to eat. It would be best in a cocktail that requires crushed ice or as a bed for raw oysters.

Besides ice, we tried shaving frozen mango juice and frozen sweetened cold brew coffee, and the results were delightful. Sugar made the frozen liquids softer than ice, so they shaved up into a lighter, downier texture.

If you’re dissatisfied with the texture of the ice, we’ve discovered that you can adjust the angle of the blade with the help of a screwdriver. The adjustments you can make are quite minute, but they do make a difference, and can potentially allow you to shave finer or coarser textures. Just be warned that shaving ice finer can slow down the process.

This attachment is purely for fun. But as fun gadgets go, this one yields a high level of delight for a very low level of effort. Especially if you freeze juice and skip the step of making or acquiring syrups, you can make a sweet frozen treat in not much more time than it takes to unwrap a popsicle.

Kids will undoubtedly love this thing and can go nuts experimenting with freezing and shaving different beverages. But it could also make for a nice dinner party trick: Delight your guests with bowls of shaved ice and an array of toppings while saving yourself from the stress of baking a cake.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Many people are surprised or disappointed to find that this attachment doesn’t work with regular ice cubes. You have to use the special ice molds included. But running a blade over the smooth, flat surface of a puck of ice is what allows this attachment to shave such delicate and evenly textured piles of snow. It would be difficult to achieve the same results from a pile of ice cubes.

You are somewhat limited by the number of ice molds that come with the machine (four), but you have a couple ways around this. The most economical, but more time-consuming, is to pop the ice out of the molds as soon as it’s frozen and store it in a zip-top bag. You can then refill the molds, and over time build up a stash of ice pucks ready to shave.

KitchenAid also sells a set of four molds separately for $25, so you can supplement your supply (or replace molds if they crack).

We don’t know how well the blades will hold up over time or how quickly they’ll dull. But if you do need to replace them, KitchenAid sells those separately, too. And we’ll continue using this attachment to see how it holds up.

The alternative

We haven’t tested standalone shaved ice machines, including the popular Hawaiian Shaved Ice S900A Electric Shaved Ice Machine, so we can’t say how they compare with the KitchenAid Shave Ice Attachment in terms of speed or effectiveness.

The Hawaiian Shaved Ice machine has one possible advantage over the attachment: You push the ice puck down onto the spinning blade manually (the attachment uses a spring-loaded mechanism), so you can adjust the amount of pressure applied to achieve a wider range of ice textures.

It also has an obvious downside: It takes up more space.

And we don’t know much about the motor on the Hawaiian machine, but we would guess the KitchenAid attachment has the advantage there too, since the stand mixer’s motor has enough power to mix dense cookie doughs or knead bread and is durable enough to last for decades.