I’ve gotta brag for a moment: I haven’t bought bread in over 5 months. If you know me, you know that I’m simply not a baker. I can cook, but baking is just too technical for someone like me that has problems following directions. So, the fact that I’m baking all of our bread is a really big accomplishment. And, the fact that the kids like it is a small miracle. 
My intro to baking started as a quest to find a decent sandwich bread that I could make in the bread machine, and I just wasn’t finding anything awesome and the kids were very disappointed with the results. I wanted our weekly loaf to be soft enough that it would make a good sandwich loaf, but also dense enough so that it didn’t just fall apart when you spread peanut butter on it or sliced it thin.
So, using the handwritten notes of my grandmother scribbled in the margins of the bread machine cookbook she gave me, I decided to modify the recipe we liked the best using a little trial and error and a lot of help from grandma. Thanks, grandma!
Admittedly, there was quite a bit of error, but it was actually kind of fun trying out different ingredients and measurements. While doing this process I was really glad I was using the bread maker, as it took me out as a variable and made it easy to pinpoint ingredient and measurement changes because the process was so uniform.
When we finally hit on the perfect recipe, we were high-fiving in the kitchen as we enjoyed our now-famous loaf fresh out of the bread machine. The kids have now memorized the recipe and can basically do every step of the process, they just wait for me to plug it in and set it on the correct bread setting and loaf size.