Clevelander Sarah Wagner Brings Her Holiday Gingerbread Tradition to Cleveland Public Library

As is the case for many, it’s getting to be holiday baking season for Sarah Wagner.

But her kitchen contains some atypical tools of the trade. Alongside the baking sheets and KitchenAid mixer, there’s an X-acto knife, a trowel and a Dremel sander.

Wagner became known on Cleveland social media for her intricate gingerbread models of Cleveland landmarks, including the West Side Market, Terminal Tower and, last year, East Fourth Street, her favorite part of town. But this year, she’s embarked on her biggest, most ambitious project yet: A scale model of the main branch of the Cleveland Public Library.

“I love living in Cleveland,” says Wagner, who lives Downtown in an apartment where she can see the library from her living room window. “People are really passionate about Cleveland and like to see other people loving Cleveland, so this is my way of doing that.”

She started baking at the end of October, and that came after almost another month of coming up with her schematics for the project. She was commissioned by the library, which provided architectural drawings, enabling her to make the project more accurate and to scale.

The gingerbread library will be displayed at the main branch during the holiday season, resting on a base that’s 32 inches by 38 inches.

“I had to make sure it would be able to go out my door,” she says. “I’ve never worked this big before.”

By her count, she’s used five five-pound bags of flour and three one-pound bags of Isomalt, a beet-based sugar substitute that she uses for the building’s windows. Using Isomalt is one of the changes she’s undertaken in her projects.

“I used more corn syrup,” she says. “I used a lot of molasses before, but that made it darker. “I did a lot of testing before baking, which is new for me. It's science, design, architecture, history, all these things blended together, which is fun. The gingerbread ends up being a funky mix of all my interests together.”

The project has been exhausting, but she’s still thinking about what the next one might be.

“I think Severance Hall would be fun,” she says. “Heinens would be a good one, too.”

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