Fresh bread!

This past fall my mother-in-law showed me how to make bread in a Bosch. It was a pretty interesting process and much easier than making it all by hand (yay for machines doing the kneeding for you!), but I wasn't quite convinced that I'd ever be able to reproduce that yummy bread smell with just some ingredients and a Bosch machine (not that I have a Bosch right now, but if I ever did have one). Well, on my birthday a week and a half ago, I opened a present from my parents-in-law and was delightedly surprised find a new breadmaker sitting comfortably inside the large cardboard box. They even sent along a breadmaker cookbook and a large bag of yeast to get me started!

On Monday night while we were out doing other errands, Jonathan and I picked up the few more ingredients we'd need to start making our own bread, and yesterday we tried the new breadmaker out for the first time. I know lots of you out there are pretty amazing cooks and do cool things like making bread by hand. I wish I were that cool, but I think I'll start off easy and learn my way up the bread-making ladder. Needless to say, I was pretty excited to try out the first loaf of bread that we made! (How excited was I, you might ask? Well, I took 21 pictures of the first loaf, if that's any indication... :)

Thanks so much, Mom and Dad Gerrans! We're really looking forward to using the breadmaker to make a lot of yummy breads in the future!

It's done!

Cooling before we dig in

First slice

Raspberry AND peach in a fruit spread! Can jam get any better than that?!*
Mmm, such a good-tasting slice of bread!

*Searched long and hard for that high fructose corn syrup-free jam - it tastes great! (Boo Smuckers for making all your jams with HFCS...)