The first bread maker that I bought was a special offer from a magazine. Big mistake! The recipies had been translated into English and, in some cases, were not complete. The results, of course, were not very successful. Then I spotted a work colleague munching her way through lovely sandwiches every day and she told me that she had a Panasonic SD 253.

A little research proved that to buy it from a Panasonic shop was considerably more benficial price wise. I have never regretted spending the £99 that it was some five / six years ago.

I have to say that I have only used it to make bread, although it contains many recipies for muffins and cakes. Some are just to mix the ingredients and some to bake the cake in the bread pan itself.

It is particularly useful that there is a delay timer for a number of the recipies, so I set it up before going to bed , to awake to the smell of freshly baked bread. It does take a particular type of knife to slice, neatly, newly baked bread.

Although I always set the crust to be lightly browned, I do find that the bread comes out crusty all over. If, like me, you have loads of fillings and crowns, really crusty bread can be a problem so.. as soon as it is cooked, I take the loaf out, wrap it in a clean tea towell and pop inside a large plastic bag. As the steam comes out of the loaf it condenses in the bag which would make the loaf soggy, except the tea towell absorbs the moisture. When the loaf is cool I transfer to a dry plastic bag or container.

Because there are no preservatives in the bread it does not keep as long as shop bread, and if you put it in the fridge it goes hard. Not that it stays around vey long, it is so absolutely scrummy. But on occassion, I have sliced up the end of a loaf and popped in the freezer, as it is useful for toast.

There is another advantage to no preservatives; for many decades I suffered, most embarrassingly from antisocial wind. I noticed that this ceased when I started to eat my own bread. Proved many times when having bought a shop made sandwich.

The instruction book takes a little wading through and it has taken a while to really get to grips with it. But it does contain a very useful 'troubleshooting' section.

I mostly make white or wholemeal bread but have experimented with Curry & Mango, Cheese & Bacon, French, Pizza dough, Ciabatta, Sundried Tomato but there are many many more, including GLUTEN FREE. There is a problem if you wish to make granary bread, the whole grain in it is sharp enough to damage the non-stick lining of the bread pan. There are two ways to get around it; firstly you sieve the flour and grind up the whole grains before adding to the pan (slightly defeats the object but you do get all the goodies in) or again, sieve the flour, retain the whole grains, mix the other ingredients on Dough mix, take out, add the wholegrains and bake in the oven. You can do this with the packet mixes also, let the bread maker do the hard work and then make rolls, twists any shape you like and bake in the oven.

The first couple of times the little paddle that kneads everything up came out with the loaf and I only discovered it when slicing the bread. Now I look for it.

This particular model has a compartment on top, to which you can add various things like bacon, nuts etc, for certain recipies. At the appropriate time in the cycle, the compartment opens and in drops the contents. Personally, I have not been very successful with this but that might be me not the machine