READ THE RECIPE CAREFULLY

When baking or cooking something you would figure directions would be the easiest thing to do, just read the sheet and copy as it says... NOPE. My gingerbread group and I along with every other group in our class did not read out gingerbread dough instructions correctly and ruined our dough. We did not add the butter in properly causing the dough to harden like a rock every time it went into the fridge. We had to roll is and warm the dough up with our hands, microwave, and even add water to it because of that one little mistake. It really set us back for time to build our house because a whole extra day was spent on rolling the dough back soft again, only to put it BACK in the fridge again for the next day. :( This taught us a very valuable lesson, no matter how small the instructions says it is a big deal and it does make a drastic difference in our overall product. I found that groups that properly mixed their dough had tasty, solid dough good for building where as my group's dough was hard to roll due to it breaking and it was not good quality taste. Lesson learned.. don't wing it and think that it will be okay because in most cases the directions are specific for a reason.