Newbie Bread Maker Help!

Welcome to TFL!

Please forgive me if I ask too simple of questions.  I take from your post title that you are new to bread machines, not just new to this web site.  So I am going to assume this was your first attempt at bread. 

My first bread was in a bread machine, and I learned on my own the hard way, so I'm going to ask questions that relate to my learning experience, and I will try to cover all the bases that I think could happen with a raw beginner.

- Is this your first loaf in this bread machine, or have you made successful loaves with this machine before?  

- Do you know what it means when the "dough walks around the  paddle" ?   Did you adjust water or flour so that indeed the "dough walked around the paddle" ? (I'll try to  find a youtube video that shows what this means.)  

Another way of saying it is "the paddle walks the dough around the pan."  Too much water, or not enough water, or too much dough, or too little dough, and the paddle can't "walk" the dough ball around properly.  That's my experience with a single-paddle machine. I have never used a two-paddle machine, but I suppose the concept is similar.

- What city/country are you in?  That might help us know what kind of ingredients you are using.  THere are people from all over the world here.

- Did you use tap water, filtered tap water, bottled purified water, or bottled spring water?

- Did you use "active dry yeast" or bread machine/instant yeast?

- What model bread machine is this, exaclty?   One paddle or two paddles at the bottom?

- Can you give a web link to this recipe?  If not, can you copy it out in a comment, so we can see what is supposed to be in it?  

- Was this recipe recommended by the manufacturer of the machine _for this specific model_?  That is, was this recipe in the manual that came with it?

- And, did you change anything, make substitutions, or add in anything?  Looks like cranberries and nuts.  We need to know if the recipe called for those, or if you added them in on your own. Substitutions and add-ins usually have "knock on" effects that change other things.

- Did you use the delay start?  As in, did you put the ingredients in at night, and set its timer to bake in the morning?   That is dangerous for a recipe that you haven't tested and made adjustments for.  Almost all recipes have to have adjustments because your brand of flour will be slightly different than the brand that the recipe-maker used.  Or, you might scoop a measuring cup of flour and get more, or maybe less, than what the recipe-maker got. Whenever I change flour i have to make adjustments on-the-fly in order to get the dough ball to "walk around the paddle" by adjusting, either by adding water, or adding flour, or both, or removing a pinch of dough of the ball gets too big.    

So, if the recipe was not previously tested/adjusted by you first (to match your brand of flour, your scooping technique, etc.) and then you set the timer for it to bake while you slept, you would not know if the dough ball "walked around" properly.  

Again, please excuse if you are not a raw beginner with bread machines.  Though I suppose other raw beginners are out there reading this, and these questions will benefit them somehow, even if they don't comment.

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Even if bread looks bad, as long as it is cooked through, I usually eat it.  And, never throw out a loaf, even if it is undercooked.  You can cut it up and  finish baking it in the oven or toaster oven, and feed it to the ducks, geese, or other birds. They don't know any better, and will love you.  Even bread "bricks" can be chopped up and shared with the critters.