Home Made Bread

My dad makes amazing bread (I think it was his way of taking a break from work but still being productive) and I've learned a few tricks from him. The last few years I started making home-made whole wheat bread for our lunches. We enjoyed it, but it sure took a lot of time. This summer I finally pulled out a bread machine that I inherited and tried to figure it out. I'd never used one before and it came without an instruction manual. Chris (who is much braver than me) found a similar manual on-line and we started experimenting. I've been impressed and we've been eating bread machine bread ever since. It takes about three hours to bake a loaf of bread, but since all I have to do is start the machine it isn't too bad. We've made white bread, wheat bread, onion bread, and some delicious cranberry nut bread. Yesterday I decided to try some oatmeal bread. I came home to find this:

For only one true failure over the last four months, I guess that's pretty good, right? We think that the oatmeal sucked up all of the water and so the dough wasn't able to mix and get the yeast to raise the bread. Oh well. I guess I'll try that one again (or not and just be happy with what works!). I really found it quite funny.