Rising To The Occasion

Baking bread has always been one of my favorite pastimes.  It has been off and on due to work and family, but anytime I threw together the ingredient and produced loaves of the fresh, warm goodness it has been received with the highest accolades by those who gobbled it up!

I recently watched a commercial for the KitchenAid stand mixer and fell in love with it, but I had sticker shock when they announced the price.  I can bake a lot of bread with my hands for a lot less, and bread machines are cheap compared to the KitchenAid.  Still, I wanted the real bread making experience—getting my hands into the dough and kneading, then watching it rise.  As an alternative I went online and checked out my mother’s old Sunbeam MixMaster.  Her stand mixer stayed on the kitchen counter and worked at mixing something every day for as long as I lived at home. 

 

The MixMaster is cheaper but it has a bread hook and fair reviews in the bread making category so I thought, “why not?”  After I bought the machine I discovered that the MixMaster has 350 watts of power and 12 speeds compared to KitchenAid’s 300 watts and 10 speeds—lucky duck that I am!!  No flash, no bells and whistles, just mixing.

                                                               Ciabatta sponge

Now I am busy baking ciabatta, focaccia, wheat bread, white rolls and loaves of apple bread and oatmeal bread.  Yum, yum, yum!  I baked three loaves in one afternoon and I started thinking, “who wouldn’t want a yummy loaf of bread for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas?”

Not much knitting being done.  Macy is hanging around my feet a lot, waiting for goodies to drop on the floor.  Max prefers to be a dog ball until the bread is out of the oven.

Life is good.