This past Saturday my friend Anna and I decided to hang out. We rented a movie(The Switch) and made dinner: meatloaf, mash potatoes, and bread with nutella for dessert. now a few months ago I bought a bread machine, and I have not used it. mosty because it takes around 3-4 hours, and I don't like to leave stuff cooking/baking when I'm not in the apartment and no one else is at the apartment either. so it was tough to find a consecutive 3-4 hours that I would be able to stay in the apartment. so we decided to bake bread using my bread machine. we used the basic recipe for white bread. the manual comes with recipes of breads and jams(yes, it makes jams!) and the first one is basically a simple basic white bread recipe(delish though!) that is pretty much to get you familiar with your bread machine. I had forgotten to put in the blade in the bread pan, so when we had put in all the ingredients and hit start, nothing was happening. that's when we realzed the blade was not there, so we had to dump the ingrdiants and start all over. thankfully, we had more than enough of the ingrediants and it was a very basic recipe, so it didnt take too long to do it over again. however, it worked the second time(after we put the blade in)and it was cool seeing the bread kneaded, and punched, and rising, etc. the bread machine has a countdown and so you can see what is happening to the bread at specific time. it was really cool and really easy! the bread above is the bread that we made, 2 pound loaf, and it was delish! I dont have a bread knife, which made it tricky to cut but in the end, it was very delish and a lot of fun! I am glad I used my bread machine once before I leave for China, but I do kinda regret not using it more often before. when I come back though, totally will! no more buying bread!