My New Best Bread Friend

Thanks to an incentive at work I got to pick out a "me" present. The website we can choose to redeem our points has everything from jewelry to bicycles to kitchen gadgets to hot tubs. Seriously, you can get a hot tub, although I'm pretty sure you'd have to work your entire life before you accrue enough points to actually be able to purchase it. You could really spend so much time on that site just trying to decide what you want. Luckily you can also create a wishlist so I've been saving up my points for a while to purchase this...drum roll please... bread machine.

This Cuisinart bread machine has 16 different settings along with 3 loaf sizes and 3 crust colors (or doneness if you will). Of course we had to give it a whirl right away so this last weekend we picked out the first bread that sounded delicious and bought the ingredients. The recipe was for 100% Whole What Bread. Sounds relatively healthy, right? We only had to purchase the whole wheat flour and the vital wheat gluten. Tell me, have you ever bought vital wheat gluten??? We actually had to Google it to find out first what it was, and second what the heck it does! After searching Wal-Mart twice over we finally found it hiding on the top self at the very end of the aisle. Talk about never having to restock this item. Glad we found it though.

Here is the finished product in all her glory. The bread was delicious. We have toasted it and spread peanut butter and Nutella on it. Or last night I dipped it in my soup. Ahhh, I can't wait to try out more recipes!