Bread Maker, Bread Maker, Make Me My Bread!

Bread is probably my second kryptonite behind Ice Cream...

Last week my boss was talking about having a garage sale and listed a few things she needed to get rid of. One of the items was a bread maker! I have always wanted a bread maker! So I asked her to let me know how much she wanted for it and she said 'It's yours!'. I was so excited!

Sunbeam Bread Maker

Last night, I was so excited to bake some bread in my 'new' bread maker! I knew that I was going to need 'bread yeast', so on my way home from work I stopped by the grocery store to pick some up. I assumed that I had the remainder of the ingredients to make white bread. Little did I know that I needed bread flour! ARGH! I had called Joe when I got home asking if he could use the interweb (while he was still at work) and look up the difference between bread flour and all purpose flour. I knew he wouldn't have time to go to the store prior to his 6pm neighborhood board meeting (did I mention he's the treasurer?!?!?). So when I got home I read through the manual and found a wheat bread recipe, which of course required wheat flour (which I had). So wheat bread it is! When he got home he surprised me with Bread Flour! So sweet! I guess I'll be finding another recipe to try out for tonight or tomorrow.

Wheat Flour, Bread Yeast & Bread Flour

Wheat Bread Making Process

The process is quite simple. First you add the wet ingredients (Water and Butter) and then the dry ingredients (Light Brown Sugar, Salt, Whole Wheat Flower, and Bread Machine Yeast) into the loaf pan, close the lid, plug it in, fix the settings to the type of bread and badda bing! The bread making begins! That's it! No stirring, mixing, mess making required before hand. The actual 'baking process' takes about 4 'short' hours for the wheat bread, maybe some of the other breads take a little less time. For the first 30 minutes the ingredients rested. Once the timer hit 3:30min remaining the mixing began! For the next 1.5 hours, the bread maker rested to let it rise even more, then back to mixing, rested, back to mixing probably rested every 30 minutes and mixed for 1 minute. It was a very off and on process.

Whole Wheat Bread Recipe

The Kitties were very intrigued by the 'mixing' noise. It wasn't a very loud, but a noise they were not use to.

Contessa (left) & Norman (right)

4.5 hours later... Sliced Fresh Bread!

We ate it fresh and warm straight from the bread maker! We also added a little cinnamon butter. YUM! I think some honey butter would have been even better!