Baking is a fun and delicious hobby and skill that can turn into a lucrative business. Many bakers turn their passion for baking into a money making business. Waking up every day and doing what you love to do is the best job in the world and bakers enjoy this job. Learning how to bake is easy and all you need are the proper baking tools and some know how. Many books are available on baking and many sites on the World Wide Web have step by step guides to baking.For people who also want to know something about healthy recipes, the easy recipes or tasty recipes, you can check online.

Baking tools and supplies are needed for baking. Aside from having an oven you will need other materials in order to start baking. Measuring cups and spoons are needed to get exact measurements of ingredients needed. An electric mixer will make putting all the ingredients together and mixing them an easier task. If no electric mixer in available you can use spatulas, wooden spoons and mixing bowls to mix the ingredients together. Baking pans and baking trays are where you will put the batter before placing in the over. Rolling pins are needed to flatten the dough and take bubbles away.

There are other baking tools available for specific types of baked good. When baking cookies, you will need cookie sheets and wax paper to place the cookie batter on before putting in the oven. Wax paper is needed so that the cookies won’t stick to the pan. If you wish to make cookies in different shapes, you’ll need different cookie cutters. There are so many different cookie cutter shapes available from hearts to stars to Christmas trees for the holiday season and pumpkins for Halloween. You can also choose to retain the normal round shape of cookies if you want.

When making bread you will be using different baking tools too. Bread loaf treys of different sizes are needed depending on the bread you are making. You will also need a bread bin to let the bread cool down and to keep away from pets and pests.
  For baking cakes, you will need cake pans of different shapes and sizes. You can also look for different cake stencils in order to decorate the cakes you just baked. If you want to add icing to your cakes then you’ll need rubber spatulas to spread the icing and you’ll need pastry bags to make decorative icing designs.

There are many other baking tools available in the market. You just have to choose what you want to bake and how you want it to taste and look like.

Children will sometimes ask some interesting questions that challenge our knowledge. I guess the great thing about this is that we learn too and with the Internet now readily available we are able to research a topic is quite easily.

So the questions today as we were having breakfast (toast) was where did bread come from and who made up the recipe?

This question was not one I could answer immediately and so off to the computer I went. This is put together to share my findings and I hope you find it interesting.

The main ingredient of bread is wheat so we start our story here – and it is a long way back as wheat has been cultivated by man since before recorded history. Anthropologists think that people first stockpiled the grain as a storable food source. When the grain got wet it started to sprout, and so people found that if the grain was planted it yielded yet more seeds.

First grown in Mesopotamia and Egypt wheat was likely first just chewed. Later people discovered that it could be pulverized and made into a paste. Cooked over a fire the paste baked into what we refer to as flat bread which kept for several days. Leavened or raised bread was discovered when yeast was accidentally introduced to the paste.

At around 1000 BC, inquiring minds isolated yeast and were able to introduce the culture directly to their breads. Also a new strain of wheat was developed that allowed for refined white bread. This was the first modern bread.

It was also during this time that people discovered other types of bread making or recipes.

Some people saved a piece of dough from a batch of bread to put into the next day’s dough. This was the start of sour-dough, a process still used today.

It was the Greeks who picked up the technology for making bread from the Egyptians and then the practice spread over the rest of Europe. Bread and wheat were important in early Rome where it was thought more vital than meat.

If they were not given their allotment of bread the soliders felt neglected – a term now referred to by many churches and included in the Lords Prayer “give us our daily bread”. The meaning today is “give us more sustenance” but it is easy to see where this term came from.

Bread is also a slang term that the English use to mean money. The “bread winner” is the person who earns the money. Also the term “bread and butter” is used meaning the basics.

The Roman welfare state was based on the distribution of grain to people living in Rome and later the governors of the time even baked the bread. This became a way for the rulers to exert more control over the people as they became reliant on the rulers. It was one of the few foods that sustained the poor through hard times and still does today.

During the French Revolution of 1788 -89 there were “bread riots” – that is riots caused by the increased bread prices and subsequent risk of starvation. The average French household would eat up to two loaves of bread per week as their staple diet but due to weather conditions and a bad wheat harvest the price of bread escalated by 67% in 1789 alone.

Bread has a long history for a reason. It is a healthy and nutritious food that fills the stomach as well as the soul.

Through much of history a person’s social status would be based on  the color of bread they consumed. The darker the bread, the lower the social status as the whiter flours were more expensive and harder for millers to adulterate with other products. We have now seen a reversal of this trend when darker breads and those with whole grains are more expensive. I think my children would quite happily consume white bread and toast but I prefer mine to be a wholegrain variety. Maybe it is because I think these breads to be better for me – more nutritional to promote Good Health and Wellbeing.

More recently the manufactures of bread (rather than bakers) have adopted methods to speed up the bread making process by using chemical additives to reduce fermentation time and extend the shelf life of the bread. This allows those producers to make larger quantities and give them time to get the product to the supermarket shelves.

The traditional baker was once deemed a poor peasant. Today many of us seek out quality produce and bread is no exception. We like it that our baker is using quality ingredients and are willing to pay for better bread.

Bread making machines are now commonplace in many households and they allow us to make our fresh breads using quality ingredients which suit our dietary needs. Over recent years the cost of these machines has come down so they are now an affordable option and the functionality has got a lot better too.

We use a Breadman bread maker which I think is the most popular in America today and I can see why. It is pretty easy to use (I can operate it perfectly) and the breads it produces are great. I’m sure there are a number of other good brands available but when it comes time to replace ours we would not hesitate to buy a Breadman.

It was not easy to give my children an immediate answer and I couldn’t even define who made up the recipe; however we all now know a lot more about the history of bread.