As I have mentioned in a previous review, I have begun making my own fresh soups just in time for the cold Winter months and what is the best accompaniment for homemade soup? Why homemade bread of course!

This is a nice, compact and easy-to-use bread maker that does exactly what it says on the tin and I pretty much guarantee that once you have begun using it and perfected your recipes then you will never go back to shop-bought loaves again!

The bread-maker comes with a small recipe book that contains the ideal weights and ingredients needed for several different types of loaf or you can just by a ready-made bread mix and use that in your machine though the quality is of course affected by which you prefer to use! There are twelve programmes to choose from and each relates to a different kind of loaf meaning that you can make french bread, white or granary loaves as well as a selection of sweet breads and all of these programmes are simple and easy to nuse even for a novice with little experience of baking! There are even three settings for different crusts though I don't tend to use this function much.

I like the way it has a viewing window meaning that I can watch as my bread bakes! This may sound like a tad uninteresting thing to do but I am one of those people who can't resist having a peek when baking and have a bad habit of opening and closing the oven frequently when cooking. The fact that this has a window in it means I don't have to do that and can keep an eye on everything that is going on inside the bread maker!

This came highly recommended to me by a friend and a quick look on several websites soon backed up her opinion. I paid a little under forty pounds for this from Argos and that was a very reasonable price to pay compared to some of the others on the market! I am not sure whether making my own bread has saved me any money but the taste is far better than shop bought and the smell that flows through the house now whilst baking is truly amazing!

This is certainly a good buy and a great present for someone at xmas!