My interest in reading recipes started back in the days when I was still in school — when buying grocery, cooking and doing dishes were more for fun than for need.
Sometimes these Asian moms would blog about the bread that they conveniently made at home using a bread machine. Red bean bread. Wheat bread. Sesame bread. It was like magic; you poured the ingredients into the pan, pressed a button, and then here came the bread.
I showed my sister all these bread recipes and kept telling her what fancy bread I would like to make. At some point, she must have been very impressed (or annoyed), so she bought me a bread machine so that I could stop talking and start baking.
And isn’t that right. What sometimes makes a product interesting is simply because you do not have it yet. Making bread with a bread machine was not that simple when I had to make a trip to the supermarket just for the bread and clean up afterward. I had used the bread machine once, and then it became a decoration in my kitchen.
Recently, I wanted to give the bread machine another try. And I finally got around to working on it yesterday.
My raisin bread fresh out of the oven machine!

My favorite part about this raisin bread is that it has a lot of raisin. (I apparently did not follow the recipe and added extra raisin.) However, with one tbsp of butter, the bread smells and tastes too buttery to me; I will try to greatly reduce the butter amount in the future.

How come people make raisin bread but not dried longan bread? I like longan, fresh or dried. Perhaps I will create my own dried longan bread next time.
The unidentified floating objects are actually banana slices. Originally, I wanted to make a flower pattern with five slices of banana, which were floating (because of surface tension?) at first. However, when I tried to fix the placement of the “petals,” I messed it up even more so they started sinking.