The Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art was celebrating their 20th birthday and asked local architects to help mark the occasion with, what else? Cake!

Architects were paired with bakers in blind-date fashion, and we were honored to be teamed-up with Prantl’s Bakery, creators of the Burnt Almond Torte. For us, it was a question of how to best pair this Western Pennsylvania icon – a cake, with another Western Pennsylvania icon. It had to be Fallingwater. Burnt almonds were an ideal material to convey the building’s rough, directional pattern of stonework, candied beet sugar stood in for glass and water, white chocolate became trees, and buttercream frosting was color-matched to Frank Lloyd Wright’s original paint specifications. As one might imagine, cake does not lend itself very well to cantilevers, but we sorted that out too.

As is the time-honored tradition for birthday parties, the Museum served this (as a separately-prepared sheet cake) with ice cream. Thanks to the buzz leading up to the event, the Museum blew past their attendance projections by a factor of ten. Happy Birthday, indeed!