Breadmaking Fiasco

Inspired by Frugal Mummy over at My Beautiful Life, I dug out my old bread maker last night.  She posted a simple recipe for white bread made in a bread maker, which differed from how I had always made it so I thought I'd give it a go.

When I've used the bread maker in the past, we found that the bread tended to be pretty dense and heavy and instead of experimenting with a little less flour or a little more water, I had given up completely and not even attempted to use it.  As a consequence it had languished in the back of one of my kitchen cupboards for a couple of years at least.

When I saw Frugal Mummy's post I thought I would get it out again and give it another try, as I figured that if the recipe worked for someone else and produced a nice loaf, it might work for me too.

There followed the locating and pulling out of the machine and then the careful measuring of ingredients and putting them into the machine in the order suggested in the post.  I turned it on, left it for a few hours and then took a look and it looked to have risen beautifully and just needed to bake for the last half hour.

I was looking forward to a freshly baked loaf when all of a sudden, I was pitched into total darkness.  I thought at first it was a power cut, which we do get from time to time, but when OH checked the fuse box and we tried turning off the bread maker, as it was the only appliance that we had on that we don't normally, the lights and everything else came back on.  We re-tested the bread maker a couple more times and it continued to trip out the electrics, so came to the conclusion that it must be faulty and really not safe to use.

How annoying and disappointing.  Anyway, not wanting to waste the dough I scooped it out of the pan and into a loaf tin and popped it into the oven for half an hour or so until it looked baked through.  Waste not want not as they say.  Here's the result.

Not the most attractive looking loaf I've seen mainly due to the way I plonked it into a loaf tin lined with baking paper, but it tastes good and we've munched our way through most of it already.

Thank you Frugal Mummy, for sharing your great recipe.  It looks like I might have to make it by hand if I really want to make my own bread in future.  Now that will sort the women from the girls, to appropriate a similar saying.