Anna Zaleski, a senior product manager out of Lake Country, Wisconsin, shrunk the intricacies of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Seth Peterson Cottage into a midcentury modern gingerbread house that’s on display through Dec. 31 at the Grand Geneva Resort & Spa.
Zaleski and her fiancé Tony bought their very own midcentury modern home years back, and with intent to embrace and appreciate this style, the pair created a flourishing Instagram account (@midcentury.wi) to share the lifestyle within their 1952 split-level MCM ranch.
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Discovering the Grand Geneva Gingerbread House Competition just five days before registration closed, Zaleski endured a week of late nights inside the home. She completed a cardboard model of Seth Peterson Cottage on her first day of edible construction, and just two days later, gingerbread walls stood tall.
“When you create the pieces for a gingerbread house, you want everything to be precise so that your lines line up,” said Zaleski. “After pulling them out of the oven, and before they were cool, I trimmed those lines to make sure I had perfect square pieces. I broke off the little trimmings and adhered them to some of the wall faces in order to get the look of bricks jetting out.”
Once she had a standing structure, Zaleski turned her focus to the grounds. She laid a pretzel walkway and powdered sugar and shaved coconut snow, made ferns out of pistachios and trees out of pepitas and assembled a licorice gate.
Frosted window panes and perfectly shaped fire pit flames were noted as “happy accidents” throughout the week.
“Once I got the walls up, the windows looked a little cloudy to me, so I tried to wipe them down with water,” said Zaleski. “Well, when water comes into contact with sugar, it starts to sort of dissolve the sugar, so I’m wiping it down, and it looks great while it’s wet, and then it just started to get a little messy and cloudy. I was like, ‘Oh shoot, I have to do it again.’ For like half an hour, 45 minutes, I was panicking.”
Later on, Zaleski overcooked a peach ring she was using to create flames for the fire pit. When she attempted to clean the container and try again, the peach ring crumbled up into a vibrant blaze.
Seth Peterson Cottage isn’t Zaleski’s first gingerbread rendition of celebrated architecture. Three years ago, she assembled an A.D. Stenger MCM ranch. She considered the Austin home to be a bit simpler in architecture than the cottage and has every intention of continuing the challenging holiday craft in years to come.
“I love the math of it all, building the model, figuring out how to create a structure that way and all of the different steps that go into making these,” said Zaleski. “It’s definitely a labor of love, to say the least, but it’s so fun! And I came away with something that I’m super, super proud of. To see it up at the resort on display, see people looking at it and pointing to it, hearing ‘Oh! It’s Frank Lloyd Wright!’ It’s just really cool to be able to create something like that.”
