Baking isn’t exactly top priority here at the TechSmart office. Our culinary experiences involve selecting a chicken-and-mushroom pie at Engen that doesn’t appear too dodgy. So when LG sent us their Home Bakery bread machine we didn’t quite know what to expect.

 We’re happy to report that if “no mess, no fuss” ever applied to a product it would be this one. The LG Home Bakery requires no baking skills from your side whatsoever. All you need to do is measure your ingredients (with the measures provided with the Home Bakery), throw them into the baking tray, press a few buttons and wait. The machine takes care of the rest, meaning it mixes all the ingredients together, kneads the dough, and bakes it to perfection in about 3½ hours. There is also a delay timer present if you want to wake up with the sweet aroma of freshly baked bread.

 LG kindly provides an instruction manual/ recipe book with about 25 different bread recipes. Some of the ones we tried were the regular plain white bread, poppy seed bread, oats bread and yogurt bread, which came out especially tasty. Most recipes provided for loaves of either 700 g or 1 kg in size.

 As the name states, LG’s Home Bakery, can do more than just bread. It is also up for helping you prepare dough for pizzas, baking cakes (although a bit more work on your side is required), and preparing jam. What the LG Home Bakery of course also provides is bragging rights, since there is nothing better than being able to say “I baked it myself” – well, sort of anyways.

It comes retails at a recommended R1699, visit www.lge.co.za for more info.