Rolling and storing gingerbread dough in a zip-lock bag is a great way to prepare and store several batches of gingerbread dough, allowing for plenty of gingerbread dough when cutting out pieces.
My favorite Construction Grade Gingerbread Dough recipe can be found here.
This method that was mentioned by Nancy Rekowski from the (legacy) Ultimate Gingerbread Yahoo e-mail group, and is her secret to avoid those bubbles and makes rolling and cutting large pieces easier.
I found this method of rolling out dough to be WONDERFUL! This method allows me to make all of my dough in advance and then clean up the mess. I made 6 batches of dough and only used 4 for my current project.
Being able to simply pull out another bag of dough when I was cutting out pieces, rather than having to stop and make more dough, was a huge time saver.
Items Needed
Gallon-size ziplock bags
Your raw Construction Grade Gingerbread Dough
Directions
After mixing the dough form one or two large balls of dough from the recipe (a recipe with 3-4 cups of flour makes one ball, a recipe with 7 cups of flour makes two balls).
Put one ball each into a one gallon zip lock bag.
Close the bag but leave an inch air escape hole. Then take your rolling pin to distribute the dough evenly to all corners of the bag. You’ll end up with a perfectly square and level piece of dough.
Zip the bag the final inch then refrigerate until slightly firm. Store the bag(s) of dough in the refrigerator until needed.
Rolling the dough
When you want to use dough that’s been chilled hours to days, bring to ‘near’ room temp before rolling. Cut the bag so you can flop it over onto the rolling surface. Depending on thickness needed, use entire bag of dough, or cut in half (as shown in pix).
Roll dough to desired thickness (rolling onto silpat mats or aluminum foil, allowing the ability to easily transfer the cut pieces to your cookie sheet).
Cut gingerbread pieces using your favorite gingerbread house template. The Best Gingerbread templates are available at www.gingerbreadbydesign.com.
Dough that is rolled to thick also has a tendency to bubble. Many think that thicker is stronger but that’s not always the case. Properly dried dough is stronger than thicker dough. Often thicker rolled dough holds moisture and is unable to dry properly.
Gingerbread-By-Design provides The Best Gingerbread Templates! View the entire collection here!
