Edible Gingerbread Cuckoo Clock with Internal gears

Step 5 Baking the pieces!

Oven Hot and Ready:
At this point your oven should be hot and ready at 350 degrees F.  You can stick your cookie sheets with your gingerbread pieces into the oven.

To be noted: Check when you are making your foamcore model pieces that your pieces actually fit on the cookie sheet you are using. As you can see I had to cut the corners off of my front and back house section because they were too wide for the cookie sheet. I was saddened by this... however the branches of the details on the front would most likely cover the corner bits.

Bake:
Put your pieces on a cookie sheet covered in parchment paper, then Bake that until it’s pretty stiff, I put mine in for about 12 minutes.

Double Check Shape:
Once you take them out of the oven, take the template that you made the shape from and double check that they are the same. Before the Gingerbread cools is a great time to chop off any weird bits that have happened from baking.  Once it hardens it’s very difficult to change the shape. 

Cool Down Gingerbread:
Do not lift up off of the tray until cools as this may end in catastrophe.! Occasionally I would use the parchment paper as a sliding surface and take the pieces off of the tray and slide the parchment onto another surface. This I would do with extreme caution.   I let them cool for a couple of hours especially the larger pieces because I wanted them to be really hard and stiff.  If you don’t want to wait that long just absolutely make sure they have cooled completely. Cooling racks are best, but if you can't find those, I also used a broiling pan, ( with the slots in the bottom) to let my stuff cool off and dry out underneath.

Cover every flat surface in your house with cooling gingerbread:
You don't have to do this - however it will probably happen. There were a lot of pieces to make this gingerbread clock so I needed a lot of space. It took about a day to bake all of this.