Baking Day 02/05 - first experiments

After Uni on Wednesday afternoon Robyn and I went shopping for the ingredients before heading to my house to start the baking process.

All was going well, until we were ready to roll out the dough and I went to get the gingerbread man shape cutter out of the draw to clean it ready when I realised the cutter was missing. From there we went on an extensize gingerbread man cutter hunt, that entailed going to Robyn's house the to two supermarkets and then finally an After School Club before finding a cutter big enough.

The one and only big cutter we found was a girl gingerbread, which was fine, it's just we had not thought of having a  girl army. Our first effort was to have the gingerbread sit up. Not sure on how to do this we first tried cookie the gingerbread and while it was still hot from the oven bend it in the middle. Unfortunately that turned out to be too late as the picture above shows the gingerbread still snapped in half giving the effect of a shorter torso.

Our other successes shown above are 'carrying gingerbread' which is on the left with the arms up by the head, the only thing to consider is perhaps having the arms thinner. The last two pictures are for the posing by the clock in the cooking sequence, one worked really well the gingerbread that is leaning however the last one wasn't that good. We wanted it to look as if it was lying with the head resting on its hands. Unfortunately the bottom of the arms didn't rise as the head stopped it so we need to work out how to fix it.

To make a leg go forward we thought about adding something underneath the dough to lift it up. First of all we tried a piece of baking paper folded up but found it put a kink in the leg, so we tried tin foil. This was much better allowing us to taper and mold the foil to give a more gradual lift to the leg. It worked so well that we used the technique for other positions. 

Unfortunately the outcomes were a disaster as seen to the right. The arms in the top picture of the pushing gingerbread didn't work as they became squished and looked like fat stumps. The second image is supposed to be of a gingerbread man sat up, however the technique of just having the tin foil didn't work as while cooking the legs dropped down on to the torso as they weren't supported to stay up.