Homeschooling for Mommy

For Christmas, I asked for and got, a breadmaker. Very exciting stuff! However, not only had I never used a breadmaker before, but I had never even used yeast before! Thankfully I have a wonderful homeschool buddy, Becky, who makes nothing but fresh bread for her family and offered to come over and teach me hands on to make bread her way (which I love!).

I prepped it up and did the dough cycle in the breadmaker before she came over (she uses her breadmaker for the kneading and first rising then does the rest by hand in the oven). When we pulled the dough out of the maker it seemed a bit stiff. Turns out, I actually need to make sure the water is totally level with the measuring cup rather than just below the rim like I do for other baking. Also because of the seeming lack of water, it didn't seem to rise too much. I mean, it totally looked like bread, but not as big as the loaves I had bought from Becky.

But oh my oh my did it taste fanfreakingtastic!!! The baby wasn't terribly impressed (but then she's got a love/hate relationship with bread, sometimes she hates it, sometimes you can't get enough in her!). However, myself, Lee and Brianna ate almost the whole loaf lol 

Because of the flying through the fresh bread, I decided to try another loaf on my own. This time I did 2/3 whole wheat flour and only 1/3 white flour (Becky taught me with 1/3 ww and 2/3 white, but we prefer ww bread). I screwed up right out of the shoot lol Put all the ingredients in, turned it on, notice nothing's moving *sigh* I didn't put the spinny thing (my great terminology) back in after cleaning. So, hoping I didn't just screw up the whole thing, I dumped the stuff from the bucket into a bowl, put the spinny thing in and dumped the stuff back in the bucket. Turn it on... NOW it's working! Thankfully, even after playing with the ingredients, I didn't screw it up and it turned into a pretty loaf of bread (fully risen with the proper amount of water and such). We haven't tried it yet cause I wouldn't let anyone cut it til the first loaf was gone, but we'll try it tomorrow.

Tomorrow I'm gonna pick up some bread bags so I can freeze it as I go. I'm hoping to quickly get to the point where we don't have to buy store bought bread anymore!

BTW, welcome to my new followers!