Heya, yet another neophyte here :)

Heard a comrade talking about enjoying his bread maker, once again (yeah, done it before, but previously I've stopped at that) googled for "what bread maker to buy", and.. I bumped into this wonderful site, and more explicitly into the discussion where it was heavily suggested to try making bread on your own beforehand. The reasoning was very sound, so I spent the rest of the day studying the handbook and the lessons, and here I am reporting the outcome of Lesson 1 :)

I've never baked anything before (29, male, if anyone wonders), so it was truly a new experience. The first challenge I faced was finding the ingredients, which boiled down to translating from English (which is not my native language) into Lithuanian (which isn't, either) :) All in all, I grabbed some floor intended for bread making (I expected it to be white, as you will see I wasn't quite right), some instant yeast and kitchen scales (sticking to the proportions is a nice thing to do). The first thing I did was figuring out the recipe called for 468 grams of floor, so I measured out those unneeded 32 grams, threw the rest into the bowl and mixed with the suggested amounts of yeast, salt and water, thinking "am I good or am I good". After about 10 seconds, I started to understand that I screwed up, and voila - of course I have forgotten about the pack of floor I've got weighing 1kg, not 0.5kg :) So yeah.. run to the shop, grab more yeast. Finally, that's what I got after kneading (I tried to mimic the video presented in Lesson 1, and it was quite fun - the only drawback being, I was somewhat afraid I'd shatter the table):

Left it to rest for a while, and went to try and find an over thermometer (as my electric oven doesn't have one). Shortly put, I couldn't find it in the surrounding shops. After some more searching, I stumbled upon this [1] and this [2], together with a numerous amounts of something like that [3]. Which calls for a question: all that fancy stuff with probes, will it even work in a regular oven? I mean, you don't put the rest of it inside, do you? Anyways, after resting, my dough looked like this (at first I was like "hell, must've been too much yeast", but when I took it out the volume wasn't really all that frightening):

Beat it up again, left it for one more rest, then did what I could to shape the loaves (I tried to create some tension at the top, but I suppose this first attempt was not very successful) and scored it with a razor. The last part was actually the easiest, I'm pretty sure I kept a good angle and made the cuts in the right directions, but judging from the result I think I should go a bit deeper. Anyways, this is what I took out of my oven:

Surprisingly to me, it was actually quite tasty :) Yet now I really understand why do people bake bread on stones.. it totally sticked to the baking paper. I couldn't get it off either before letting the loaves cool down or after it. Googled for some tips, people say I should oil the paper and spread some dough on it beforehand - what do you say? And the final picture is that of the structure of the loaf, sadly the quality is quite bad, but by the time I figured it out there was nothing left to make pictures of :)

All in all, it was lots of fun, and my family is already crying for Ciabatta with cornflower seeds, so yeah.. I'll postpone my thoughts on buying a bread maker, and will keep making bread myself :)

P.S. I'll include the links to the pictures with higher resolution in case anyone's comments could use more detailed evidence :)

http://i.imgur.com/NXdm9.jpg?1 [4] http://i.imgur.com/LA2oo.jpg?1 [5] http://i.imgur.com/jBac3.jpg?1 [6] http://i.imgur.com/weHsU.jpg?1 [7]