Remember to be thankful for a gift!

When Rachel, one of my girly cake chick friends, had her birthday this week we decided to encourage her with a card expressing either the qualities we see and enjoy in her or a verse from the Bible. We decided that we would give her a gift that could be bought or handmade or something we already have that we wanted to give her, preferably connected in some way to the encouraging words we had for her!
Choosing the gift for her was the easy part,for me.
Bread. I would make bread.
Rachel recently and generously gave me her bread maker and I just love it. Everyone did laugh, however, when I made my first loaf: chocolate bread!
So I made chocolate bread for Rachel, with chocolate chips! Yummy. (Her 2 year old son thinks I am very clever to make chocolate bread!)
Simple: I followed a recipe!
There are loads of bread recipes to find on the Internet, just follow your own manufacturers guidelines for the order you put the ingredients in the pan.
Here is the basic recipe I use... and then a Luci adaptation for chocolate Mocha bread that is also proving popular.
chocolate bread recipe for 1 1/2 lb loaf:
1 cup water
1 egg beaten
1 tbsp skimmed milk powder
1 tbsp butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
2 1/8 cups strong white flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp dry yeast
add 1/4 cup chocolate chips, part way through the cycle - my machine goes beep!!!

For the creative Luci adaptation.... Chocolate Mocha bread:
replace strong coffee for water. I use strong coffee from my cafetiere.
Enjoy!

I wrapped the bread once cool, in parchment/greaseproof paper and then brown paper, tied it up with string and put it in a used gift bag I had. The gift bag had the name of the store on it, so I tore 2 strips of gift wrap and stuck it on the 2 edges of the bag. a great way to re-cycle those lovely paper gift bags from shopping trips!