If you’ve been reading my posts over the last few months then you already know that I’ve sort of been on a cooking spree. I’ve always enjoyed cooking and baking, but over the last few years, other than making dinners, I kind of stopped being creative, however, for some reason, over the last few months I started getting my cooking groove bake and we’ve had lots of delicious treats to eat.

In December I made several types of cookies and special sweet breads. I also made two pumpkin cheesecakes. Yum!

I had been planning on making cinnamon buns and cinnamon swirl bread but we had a surplus of baked goods in the house given that there’s only two of us in the house to eat the food that I make so I had to lay off for a while.

Anyway … this past weekend, Chris and I were in Costco and we happened to be walking down a row that had kitchen appliances. Guess what I bought … yep … a bread maker. I truly enjoy making bread from scratch, but I’ve always been interested in trying out a bread maker. Well .. I guess the price was right so we bought it and by that evening we had our first loaf of white bread.

The first loaf of bread turned out great. It was delicious, but since I’d tried the rapid white cycle i.e bread in less than an hour and a half it was a little more yeasty than I like so I was determined that the next loaf that I made would be for a full cycle with a normal amount of yeast. So … the next day I found a recipe online for a tasty sounding Flax Sunflower Bread that I just had to try. I got to work putting the ingredients together in the machine and then set it to a normal cycle so it took about three and a half hours but oh … it turned out great.

The second loaf of bread was tasty! Actually we still have a little bit left,. As I said there’s only two of us in the house so trying to eat two loaves of bread in as week is a lot and I”m sure we ate more than we normally would because there’s nothing like eating bread when it’s still warm and fresh after it’s taken out of the oven (or bread maker). Oh and that Flax Sunflower bread … I think it’s going to be a healthy bread to keep on hand too … maybe too healthy if one were to eat too much if you know what /I mean ie think colon cleanse hint hint!

This weekend we’ll go out shopping for some rye flours special bread flours (I was using all purpose flour) so any breads I make going forward should be even better and of course with a wider selection of flours on hand I can experiment a little bit more. I’m sure I”ll eventually get around to making that cinnamon swirl bread that I’d intended to make back in December … I mean it started this whole thing. LOL

Do any of you have a bread maker? Do you use it regularly? What kind do you have? The one we bought is a Breadman bk1060 and so far it’s been working well.