Harry Potter - The Weasley's Burrow Gingerbread House

Step 5 Baking the Gingerbread

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.

Bake that until it’s pretty stiff, I put mine in for about 18 minutes. 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.  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 over night 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.

The two huge pieces ( top sides)  I baked for another 10 minutes on a lower temperature.

Now that you know how I baked each piece of gingerbread you should know how crazy it got.  There are just under 200 pieces to this gingerbread house, so my house became a gingerbread factory, I would roll out two cookie sheets worth of pieces put them in the oven, then start on another two cookie sheets of pieces. I would then swap two cookie sheets out of the oven once they were baked for another two cookie sheets of unbaked that would then head into the oven. Baking this entire gingerbread house took me two and a half days of my oven being on almost the whole time.  The only time I turned my oven off, was when I was mixing more dough. There were pieces of baked gingerbread on every flat surface in my house.