Gingerbread!
14 November 2003, 4:59 PM

The house smells wonderful right now. I just made my first batch of gingerbread dough. I'm going to make a gingerbread house for a competition at our university's bookstore. I've been thinking about it and planning for it for a week now, and I would have started baking yesterday except that Cedar Pollen Season is upon us and I felt like crap.

I haven't even baked the dough yet and it smells so good in here. It's nicely wrapped up in plastic wrap and in the fridge for tomorrow's baking. The stand kitchen mixer proved its worth. I was going to have my sweetie do the kneading since the cold weather is making the arthritis in my hand act up. But it occurred to me that the thing had a dough hook...

It worked beautifully. I'm so glad we got this thing now. they are rather expensive, (about $300) but we were able to afford ours by using our wedding gift certificates and gift registry discount when we bought an open box display model (total cost to us: $19.95). Ours is a lovely matte gunmetal grey. Now I really want to bake some bread...

Tomorrow I'm going to cut out templates and get some of other ingredients (icing, crushed lifesavers) ready for the baking, cooling and basic assembling. Sunday or Monday I'll do the actual decorating.