My Favourite Breadmaker Recipe!

I love the smell of homemade bread! When I got quite a bit of birthday money a few years back, I finally decided to buy a breadmaker, and I haven’t regretted it yet 🙂 I do have to be  careful not to cave to the temptation to eat half the loaf when it comes out of the breadmaker, but generally I manage that! I only just managed to get this photo taken this morning before my dear husband came and pinched a bit of bread off the side…

Homemade bread is also a great way to bless people, as most people love it, and it’s a fun thing to serve when you have company, with some butter and cheese. Here is my favourite recipe for the bread I make most days, that my family loves.

Yeast 1.5tsp

Strong White Bread Flour 350g  (2 and 3/4 cups)

Strong Wholemeal Bread Flour 125g  (1 cup)

Sugar 1.5tsp

Butter 25g  (2 tbsp)

Salt 1.5tsp

Water 320ml  (1 and 1/3 cup)

Chewable Vitamin C tablet crushed (this helps it to rise)

I use the grams and ml since I’m in the UK. The measurements in brackets are as near as I could convert to, so hopefully it still works if you use cups! I put the ingredients in the breadmaker in the order shown, as exactly as I can. If you use a measuring scale, the water can be measured as grams which is quite handy – 320ml is the same as 320 grams. I put this in the breadmaker with the Rapid bake (2hrs) program, for a white loaf, large size and light crust. The bread stays moist for a couple of days and tastes great.

In case anyone is looking at buying a breadmaker, it might help you to know that I have a Panasonic SD254 and I love it, apart from I think the one with the raisin dispenser gives you a few more options. It does seem to be a good idea to research models before buying, as I have heard a lot of bad stories about breadmakers not working very well.

The fruit of being a stay at home mom

Often I catch myself thinking thoughts like, ‘No-one sees what I do’ and ‘Whatever I clean up just gets dirty again’. And when I was in a room of people and they went around the room and everyone had to say what they did, it seemed like the bottom of the pile in terms of what people think of someone being a stay at home mum.

But recently it struck me when someone complimented me on the children, that people may not see your job as worth much, but they do see the fruit of it. And even if it is not attributed to you, the point is that it is great fruit! If I do my job well as a mother, my children will benefit, for example the Bible says that if we train a child in the way he should go, then when he is old he will not depart from it (Pro 22:6) and if I do my job well as a wife, my husband will be so much better for it. If I look after my home and make it inviting, make meals for people etc. then so many people can be helped and encouraged from being invited there and having fellowship they would not otherwise have had. We can make such a difference by doing our job well, not only to the lives of our husbands and children, even just helping them feel contented and loved, but also to the people that they meet who are impacted by them. And then we can do even more through serving in our church and doing good to other people.

So though we should do everything we do to please God, we can also encourage ourselves in the thought that there is great fruit from working hard at what we do, as a wife, mother, and homemaker . It may not be noticed, but God knows and we know, how fruitful we can be. And of course to bear real fruit we need to stay close to God, so that should be an encouragement to keep God our top priority too! “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.” John 15:5