As we speak, Round 3 of my battle to get my bread machine to produce a decent loaf of bread, and while the outcome is not certain, at least this time, if it does not turn out right, I will know why.

But first, let’s back up our story a bit. Loaf 2 turned out exactly the same as Loaf 1, in other words, a dry crumbly mass of parched dough sprinkled with marbles of same.

So clearly, my previous scientific theory, that it was the whole wheat nature of the flour used for Loaf 1 that was to blame, was false. Regular white all-purpose flour produced an identical result apart from the exact coloration of the Loaf of Doom that resulted.

So the line of inquiry then turned to the exact nature of the flour used, specifically, its freshness, and whether or not it was “bread machine flour”. Freshness was a serious issue, because the Spaghetti Monster only knows how long that flour for Loaf 2 had been in the dark depths of our cupboards. As spuug pointed out, flour does not last forever, even if it is kept in the dark in a big clamshell style style tupperware container. This stuff was probably deader than Disco.

So last night, I bought some new flour, and for good measure, made sure it said “bread machine flour” on it. I also bought new yeast, even though the yeast we bought at Costco is still fresh. But it does not say “bread machine yeast” on it, and plus it is from some obscure brand I have never heard of, so to heck with it, I am covering all the bases.

Plus, the new yeast is Fleishmann’s, a brand I trust because they made basically all the yeast I used in my life before using Prince Edward Island, and the jars are cute. And it says bread machine yeast right on it. So I got that covered.

So I was all ready to make my third attempt tonight. I was feeling good. The ingredients were fresh, the mood was right, I cleaned Loaf 2 and all its remnants out of the pan, gave pan and paddle a good rinsing out, and started over again.

And let me tell you, as soon as I touched the new flour, I realized how dead and wrong the previous flour had been. This is what flour should be like, I thought, all soft and silky and bright bright white. Clearly, the energy was rising. I added the yeast and the rest of the ingredient, put the pan back in with the little twist to lock it in place, and started the sucked up once more, and eagerly glanced in through the plastic window to see what was happened.

And stared dumbstruck as absolutely nothing happened. The motor spun, but nothing moved in the pan.

It was then that I had one of those terrible moments in life when you realize you have done something very, very stupid : I had forgotten to put the stirring paddle back on after cleaning it.

So the machine had nothing to use to stir the ingredients together, do the kneading, etc.

So I yanked the pl;ug from the wall, freaking out a little bit and of course feeling extra strength retarded. First I tried to just sort of push the ingredients out of the way to try and wedge the thing in there, but that was made of fail. So eventually I just dumped the whole sticky mess into a bowl, cleaned out the pan and paddle again, stuck the paddle onto its little pivot in the pan, dumped everything back into the pan again, and let it go.

In theory, it should go more or less fine. After all, the ingredient merged prematurely by only a few minutes, and most of the pre-dough stuff went back into the pan, and so it should go fine.

But if it does not, I will certainly know why, and I will never ever leave the paddle out of the equation again. In fact, I predict that in the future, it will be the first thing I check before I hit that START button, every single time.

We all make stupid mistakes. The smart thing is to learn from them.

Of course, the really pesky thing about these bread machine experiments is that it takes a bread machine three hours to make a loaf, and so between starting the machine up and finding out if you did it right is 180 minutes of potential trepidation and worry.

So to stave that off, I decided now would be a good time to stay busy, and what do you know? To do that, I sat down at this here computer and started talking to you great people about my bread adventures.

Funny how that works out, huh? It has a circular ecology to it that is either beautifully full and round and eternal, or horribly autophagous and pointless and incestuous, depending on whether you favour the sword or the pentacle.

Other that my struggles with breadness, not a lot going on. My desire to succeed in Facebook games continues to cause me to seek other players of said games via “Add Me” threads on the games’ fora, thus causing me to add random strangers to my Friends list for the purposes of gaming.

And yet, even though my goal was single minded pursuit of success in a video game, these people are still my Friends now, and we help each other out in the games and see one another’s Status updates, posted links, and so on, and so I am, in a very timid and techno-mediated asynchronous non-realtime way,
making new friends, or at least, Friends.

It is an odd way to come out of one’s shell, but it is the only way that I know of that is low-stress enough for me to handle easily, and so what the heck.

Hi there all you fellow Facebook gaming addicts!

Pleased to meet you.