Gingerbread progress

Today, I baked all the pieces for my gingerbread house. I meant to get this finished yesterday, but I went out shopping all afternoon with my mom. By the time I got home, the last thing I wanted to do was roll out dough. This morning, I set out my dough to let it soften some. Since I made it Monday, it had chilled until it was too hard to work with. Then I began rolling it out. It was actually the easiest dough I have ever used! It didn't stick, it didn't break, and it didn't have to be floured constantly! I could even pick it up and turn it different ways like the chefs do. :) I guess chilling the dough thoroughly is key to being able to roll it out easily. It took a while to roll out all my pieces, simply because there were several and I could only fit two on each pan, but the rolling out process, for the first time in my life, was a breeze. All of my pieces turned out well, too. Only one of my walls didn't feel quite right to me after I baked it. I hadn't rolled it out quite evenly, so one side was fat and the other was thin. I made a duplicate of it with the left over dough to try to prevent assembly problems. I did keep forgetting to check on the dough in the oven (note to self: from now on, set the timer five minutes early), so a few pieces got brown around the edges -- not good in the gingerbread world. Hopefully, they won't become brittle and crumble on me. I did manage to bake off two absolutely perfect pieces -- no cracks, no bubbles, and all perfectly even-- which are pictured above. Considering they are only two out of about ten pieces that I baked today and the fifty or so pieces I've baked in the last three years, that's quite an accomplishment. :)