Making Bread

I have been making my own bread for a while now. And by "making" I mean "using a bread machine". Although, I do only use the bread machine to make the dough. I don't particularly like the ginormous square shaped loaf you get from baking the bread in the machine. So, I just use the "dough" setting and bake the loaves in the oven.

I'm making our bread for several reasons. 1) It's much cheaper and 2) Please tell me why we need "caramel color #72" in our bread??? ..among other things that just shouldn't be in the ingredient list for bread.

The whole bread making process is relatively easy. Especially, since I'm really only doing a quarter of the work.. measuring and pouring the ingredients into the machine, greasing and flouring the pan, placing dough in pan, pressing the buttons on the stove. *whew!*

Sad to say though, after about 6 months of this treacherous work, I kind of started to slack off a bit. We would go maybe a week without any bread because I was simply too lazy to "make" it. I actually bought a few loaves here and there. *gasp!*

Well, lo and behold, I'm back on track and making two loaves at a time!! One of thing that I wanted to share that has made it a bit easier is something I read here and implemented pretty much right away! And I LOVE IT!!!

And, in case you didn't click on the link... all you do is measure all of the dry ingredients into jars and presto! the "quarter of the work" job turns into and "eighth of the work". Until the next time you have to get the jars ready. But for me, this is so much easier and it works for me!! (sorry I didn't follow the "cleaning theme")

Jars with flour, sugar & salt. (do NOT put yeast in) (sorry if you knew that, but I prob wouldn't have)

Yummy Country White Bread

And here is Gilly enjoying a nice warm piece of freshly baked bread with honey!! YUM!

And here is the world's easiest bread recipe EVER. It's true. I wouldn't lie.

Ingredients:

-1 cup warm milk (I nuke it for 1 min)

-2 Tbl butter

-1 egg (this is optional & for those of you like me, who don't know much about baking/cooking - the egg will make your bread "fluffier")

-3 cups flour (I use 1 1/2 c wheat flour and 1 1/2 c white flour)

-2 Tbl sugar

-2 tsp salt

-2 tsp yeast

Add all wet ingredients to bread machine (milk, butter, egg), then add dry ingredients. Make a small well in top of dry ingredients and pour yeast in. Done and done!