With the credit crunch upon us I decided to get the bread maker out. It had been at the back of my cupboard for quite few months, bought by my partner before we moved in together, I decided now was the time to make our own bread and hopefully save money in the process.

The Morphy Richards fast bake is quite a large machine and it takes up quite a lot of counter space, so it wouldn't be any good if you had a tiny kitchen, It looks quite nice in silver and black and it has air vents down the side.


For such a big machine it makes quite small loaves of bread, it has a smaller metal container inside that you can remove and put your ingredients in before putting it back in and fixing it in to place.

It has a small mixer in the center that kneads the dough and due to this all your bread has a hole in the bottom, quite a lot of the time when you remove the bread the small mixer comes out in it and you have to get it out which can be quite messy.

The fast bake has many settings and you can make all different types of bread and you can choose how you want it to come out, light, medium or well done, so theres a setting for everyone.

It also has a timer so you can delay it starting. If you set it to make the bread in the early hours you can wake up to fresh bread for your breakfast, lovely.

Another nice feature is that you can just have the bread maker make bread dough and you can then use this to make home made pizzas that are both cheep and very delicious.

I normally make a medium white loaf and this takes 3 hours in total, about half the time making the dough and the other half cooking the dough. Most of the time they turn out ok although when they don't it is annoying because you have waited 3 hours. Mine have only ever not turned out ok due to human error.

The bread is always quite nice and when it's fresh its delicious, but like most fresh bread it only lasts a couple of days max before it starts to go hard.

I would recommend it though, its always nice to have fresh bread and when its baking the bread your house smells lovely. I don't think it has saved us money though, instead of buying 2 we are now making 4 loaves a week, we do however have a lot of stale bread for the ducks.