Single-serve coffeemakers are one of the hottest gifts of the holiday season. Not only can you make everyone their own special blend of coffee but the perky machines come in interesting shapes and bright colors so they look good on your counter too. Of the two dozen tested by Consumer Reports, three made our list of top-picks and a few others deserve honorable mention including the new entry from Starbucks. Here are our top five.

A KitchenAid stand mixer on the counter suggests not only that you have the cooking chops to use it but that you can afford a high-end appliance as well (typically they cost between $200 and $500). But keeping up appearances just got a bit more dear—for the holidays KitchenAid is offering stand mixers that are hand painted and signed by the artist. For $1,900 you can whip up a batch of snickerdoodles in a mixer with one of three leopard prints, regular, white and noir, or in three other options.

Power, speed, and run time are among the criteria that separate the welcome cordless-tool gift from the model that gets used once or twice before it's banished to the basement. But in Consumer Reports tests, we found plenty of choices that do all they should do with batteries that last through most jobs and don't take hours to recharge if they do run down. Here are some of our top choices that were lightweight in their respective categories and easy to handle.

For the first time in its 66 year history, some Tide commercials are featuring husbands doing the laundry. Imagine that—men washing and folding their family's clothes. What's next? Vacuuming? Maybe so. Men are spending two more minutes a day on chores than they did eight years ago—an average of 16 minutes a day. At that pace it'll take a while for them to catch up to the 52 minutes of daily housework performed by women. Still, cleaning brands are taking notice and retooling their ads and products to appeal to men.

What if a front-loader is great at getting your laundry clean and its capacity is large enough that a comforter fits comfortably--would you buy it? This front-loader costs less than most, is stingy with water, and extracts a lot of it so drying time is shortened. But here's the catch. The front-loader is from Frigidaire, a brand that's among the most repair-prone in Consumer Reports' latest Product Reliability Survey.

The average American kitchen stands at about 300 square feet, up 50 percent from the early 1970s, according to the National Association of Home Builders. In some megahouses, the kitchen alone can top 1,000 square feet. At the other end of the spectrum, more Americans are flocking to metro areas where they're willing to trade expansive living space for better access to amenities. These opposing forces are having an impact on appliance design, especially refrigerators, which now range from prodigious to petite. Consumer Reports' latest tests found winners at both extremes.

When you have a snow blower, you should expect some parts to wear out over time, and we encourage you to keep extra belts, shear bolts, and spark plugs on hand for that reason. What we don't expect to see in these machines are parts that bend under normal use. But that's what happened with the 24-inch Craftsman 88173, one of the otherwise better performers among the eight new snow blowers our experts have finished testing.

Before you pack your bags for that holiday visit or end-of-year vacation, take a safety survey to make sure your empty house isn't putting out the welcome mat for burglars. Walk around the perimeter to observe whether your shrubbery is obscuring your windows and, if so, cut it back. And a lock that's strong and sturdy can thwart crimes of opportunity. Only one of the dead-bolts tested by Consumer Reports resisted typical break-in techniques.

This week, Home Depot and Lowe's both announced new additions to to their major appliance lineups. Home Depot, the nation's largest home improvement chain, will begin selling appliances from Samsung on Sunday. Number two Lowe's will start carrying LG appliances in the first quarter of next year. Sears leads both in major appliance sales.

The average American will use seven pots and pans to prepare their holiday meals, according to the Holiday Cookaware Omnibus Study conducted by DuPont Teflon. That's good to know if you're stocking up on new cookware ahead of the holiday blitz. Also good to know? Which brands and models fared best in Consumer Reports' latest tests of more than 30 non-stick and uncoated cookware sets.

Anyone shopping for a dishwasher these days knows they typically don't come cheap. The 90 tested models in our Ratings sell at an average price of more than $950. True, some brands aim for value rather than dazzling performance, and a few such models might still perform decently. But pay too little, and you may be in for a big disappointment. That's the lesson of the Frigidaire FBD2400KS, at $310 almost the least expensive model we've tested.

One outcome of the prolonged housing slump has been that when consumers postponed renovating their kitchens and buying large appliances, manufacturers got busy redesigning small ones. The rosy results can be found in the housewares department where a bevy of stylish beauties beckon with bright colors and interesting contours for your counters. The best news is that some of these flashy machines are brilliant performers as well. Here's a collection of scarlet models that earned our top honor—a bright red blob.

After 12,500 hours of testing energy-saving LEDs, most of the lightbulbs in the labs at Consumer Reports are just as bright as they were after 3,000. What does 12,500 hours mean to you? That's like saying you bought an LED 11 years ago and used it every day for three hours. But not all LEDs still shine brightly in our lab. It was lights out for an EcoSmart from Home Depot.

Consumer Reports' eagle-eyed readers tell us about goofs, confounding claims, or inconsistencies in ads and owner's manuals. And we appreciate it. One reader e-mailed to tell us the online manual for our top-rated food processor, the Breville Sous Chef BFP800XL, says that grating cheese voids the warranty. We found that odd because the manual for the processor we tested earlier this year provided cheese-grating tips with no mention of a warranty issue.

Testing is heating up in the toaster labs at Consumer Reports. It will be another few weeks before the final results are in, revealing which toasters pop out the most evenly browned toast with the highest rate of consistency, but we can tell you this much—the current batch of toasters is the hottest we've seen in years. Here are a few of the highlights: