Coolrise Yeast Baking Basic Bread Dough

This is a recipe I got from a cooking class in sixth or seventh grade.  I have no idea who made the recipe, and if it was my teacher, I can't remember her name.  :(  Sorry, teacher.  Anyhow, this bread was the second baked good prepared by a cobalt blue stand mixer given to boyfriend as an early Christmas present from his grandma.  I'll have to take a picture of the mixer sometime, it's quite a beauty! 

If you are using a stand mixer for your bread baking, the recipe and instruction guide has rules for how many cups of flour you should use for certain size mixers, which you should, of course, adhere to.  Most recipes for bread have a range of flour to use in the recipe, and you always start with only a couple cups of flour, adding more as you mix the ingredients.  Technically, speed 2 on a stand mixer counts as kneading, but I just mixed it enough to make it a solid-ish lump, then kneaded it myself (because that's the funnest part!). 

A word of advice: if you are kneading bread, do not plunge your fingers straight into the dough.  You will never get them back until you have dumped half a bag of flour onto them.  Although, my dough did not have enough flour in it, hence the glopishness, and adding flour made it manageable. 

After the kneading and the rising, I popped it in the oven for forty-five minutes, and it came out beautifully!  I have never seen, smelled, nor touched something so perfect in all my years.  We enjoyed it with a pot roast boyfriend made in the crock pot.  It was, and still is delicious.  And it was easy.  There are easy bread recipes out there.  I recommend giving it a try, I guarantee that you will have fun and feel good afterward.