Edible Fallingwater: Frank Lloyd Wright in Gingerbread (Photos)
How a culinary artist re-created an architectural wonder in sugar.
Courtesy Melodie Dearden
Your crooked little cookie Cape Cod is about to look pretty crappy. Culinary artist Melanie Dearden topped all pretenders with her gingerbread replication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Fallingwater house. As described on her Garden Melodies blog, she and an assistant cooked, assembled, and iced the architectural wonder over the course of a week, with ingredients that add up to a sugar H-bomb. (As for what became of Dearden’s confectionary masterpiece, it went out in gloriously explosive fashion.) Here, a look at the construction of one stunning landmark in modern baking architecture.
The design took 12 hours to concoct, and required 164 separate pieces of gingerbread.
More than 12 square feet of gingerbread was needed.
Frank Lloyd Wright struggled to balance the cantilevered design over Pennsylvania’s Bear Run creek. Dearden used more than 40 sleeves of Smarties candies to shore up the stone facade of the gingerbread version.
The internal layout followed Wright’s structure.
To mimic Fallingwater’s central waterfall and creek, Dearden melted three bags of hard candy and added sky blue and green food colorings.
Just for the frosting, eight bags of confectionary sugar were enlisted.
Assistant Brenton details a tree from the structure’s famously natural setting.
The final product, which took 40 hours to assemble.
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