I’ve been making bread on and off for a few years now. I don’t tend to make it regularly so I don’t own a bread machine. It actually works as a great destressing exercise kneading the bread!

For a long time I wasn’t able to get the loaves to rise very well. They all looked like this:

I then got bought an oval silicone bread maker like this and had a go with that:

And the finally this year I seem to have got the mix right and my latest attempts have all been light a fluffy on the inside and crispy on the outside:

As with many of my more traditional recipes I’ll be posting here, this is from The Good Housekeeping Step by Step Cookbook. This is one of my favourites as the book starts with a picture of every recipe in the book. The book was published in 1992 so all the food is pretty traditional but I think it’s great at what it does and fondly refer to it as my bible.