Following the Frank Lloyd Wright Trail: Chocolate Prairie Style Stained-Glass Pie

In 2016, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth, the state legislature in Wisconsin designated a self-guided route to honor his work in Wisconsin. The trail extends from Kenosha to Richland and includes his home, Taliesin, in Spring Green. I grew up knowing about Frank because there are two houses, a church, and a conference center that he designed in Madison, my hometown.

  

People: Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 – 1959) was an American architect, who is known for designing houses and office buildings in harmony with nature, a philosophy he called organic architecture. His “prairie style” houses use horizontal lines that snuggle the building into the surrounding landscape.

Places: Frank Lloyd Right Trail.  In 2017, Dick and I followed parts of the trail including the administrative offices of SC Johnson (you know their pest control and cleaning products as Raid and Windex). Both the owner and architect were ahead of their time with a vision of a workspace that inspired productivity, esthetics, and comfort for employees. We also visited the Wright-designed Wingspread, which was originally the home of Mr. SC Johnson and is now a conference center.

This summer, I had an opportunity to follow more of the trail, with sister Jill, granddaughter Kristen, and cousins Laurie, Michael, and Anne, as we took a tour of Frank’s house in Spring Green. Later, we were able to have a peek at a FLW house in Madison as viewed from a boat on Lake  Mendota.   

Jill and I completed our version of the trail with a stop in Belvidere, IL to see a FLW chapel in the cemetery were our great aunt and uncle are buried.     

Pies: Since 2017, when I first started following the FLW trail, I was wondering what kind of pie Frank might like, or if he even ate pie. After tours of quite a few of his houses, I noticed that the kitchens are teeny tiny and would not have had enough space to roll out a crust. Nonetheless, I channeled Frank and came up with a dark chocolate nut pie on which I could place a prairie style stained-glass design. As it turns out, cake icing has some limits when drawing stained-glass on a pie. (The pie was tasty, though!)