One of the first joint household purchases that Mr C and I ever made was a bread maker. As I recall it cost about £40 from the Woolworths down the road from our first flat.
It doesn’t get as much use as I would like it to, but both of us are rather fond of home made bread rather than buying a loaf from the supermarket.
We’re also not very adventurous yet and despite all my best intentions we only ever seem to follow one recipe: the one for wholewheat bread from Marjie Lambert’s The New Bread Machine Book.
The recipe is incredibly simple, but uses honey instead of any sugar and I find that I particularly like the taste that this gives.
All the ingredients are quite simply placed in the bread maker before bed, the timer set and then this morning we woke up to the smell of freshly baked bread. Delicious!
The top of this morning’s loaf seemed to collapse in on itself (not sure why as I’ve only really seen this before when we haven’t taken it out of the bread maker quickly enough, but I thought it had only just finished this morning when I got up – assuming I set the timer right last night…) but it still tasted delicious eaten warm with butter for breakfast this morning.
S.O.L says
Hey there, I blogged about this the other day. I thought it was the yeast, but it turns out that the concave top is due to too much water. Lower it a bit. Mine says 3/4 cup. I fill it to 5/8 cup. approx 150ml water. This is for 2 cups of white strong flour.
In the back of the instruction manual for the bread maker, it has a trouble shooting page?
The other thing is that it could be is are you letting it cool in the bread maker.
Compostwoman says
The top collapses due to too much liquid,
OR poor flour quality or too much yeast….so Compostman informs me…..
He makes all the bread etc we eat…
So try reducing the liquid, or the yeast?
Still a nice looking loaf tho’ and I expect it was tasty!