During the 2018 holiday season, chef Anthony Strong had longed for a weekend escape to Lake Tahoe, but couldn’t justify the time away — his Mission District restaurant, Prairie, was then just 2 months old. “So, I decided to build a winter ski cabin out of gingerbread instead,” says Strong, 35.

Strong fell into gingerbread-house making when he was between jobs, inspired partly by his background in construction, and it has since become an annual tradition. In the past two years, he has moved from traditionally ornate gingerbread forms to the sleeker style of midcentury-modern architecture, and is now sharing his enthusiasm in a series of gingerbread ski cabin workshops this month at Prairie.

Strong took cues, in 2018, from the retro-futurism of Bay Area illustrator Rick Guidice’s space colonies, which were shiny, optimistic visions of cosmic suburbs commissioned by the NASA Art Program in 1975. Strong’s original ski cabin had a distinctive butterfly roof, a carport enclosed by a “breeze-block” wall of peppermint Lifesavers and large panes of caramelized-sugar glass — after all, an intimate connection to the outdoors is a guiding principle of the midcentury-modern design movement.

Emitting an amber glow as if there were a crackling fireplace inside, the home appeared warm and inviting in a winter wonderland of finely ground coconut snow, candy-coated chocolate rocks and a forest of cut-out gingerbread evergreen trees.

Besides its modern silhouette, the cabin also departed from having the traditional glut of candy and icing flourishes that date back to the origin of gingerbread-house making in 16th century Germany.

“Gaudy is not an option,” says the chef, who recently reprised the foot-long, 9-inch-tall cabin with more refinement over last year’s model — whole walls are now made of sugar glass, and the snowy evergreens are brilliantly portrayed by sugared rosemary sprigs, a stroke of ingenuity by Strong’s girlfriend, Katherine Altonaga, 31. “Making something beautiful is first and foremost.”

When Strong hosts his gingerbread ski cabin workshops at Prairie this month, there will be bottomless dragées, gumdrops and candy canes for those who tend toward unbridled adornment. The various parts of the structure will be baked ahead and pre-cut for the students; Strong achieves crisp lines by using an Exacto knife on still-warm sugar panes and housemade gingerbread.

While some homespun gingerbread houses are known to sag or lean with time, the chef uses an excessively glutinous, highly overworked dough he calls “bomb-proof” despite its rich golden color and tempting aroma of molasses, ginger and cinnamon. Ditto the “cement-strength” icing, which will be pre-loaded into piping bags for the workshops. Made of finely sifted powdered sugar and egg whites, the adhesive is used to bond the gingerbread seams together.

“The house is probably not for consumption,” says Strong. “At least not without a gallon of milk on the side.”

The Noe Valley resident constructed his first gingerbread house in 2016 after he left his veteran post as the executive chef of the Delfina Restaurant Group. For the first time in 11 years, Strong found himself off duty for the holidays. The result of all that free time was a two-story suburban-style abode, heavy on the decorative icing whorls and surrounded by a picket fence.

“I had so much fun making it that I couldn’t let it go. I preserved it with hairspray and then stuck it in my closet,” says the Minnesota native, who grew up helping his father build furniture, porches and additions to houses. Strong was even the general contractor for Prairie, heading up the shoestring design and build, which features indigo plywood walls instead of expensive tile or wallpaper, plus a few of Rick Guidice’s cosmic prints. Modern gingerbread houses just seemed to be a natural intersection of Strong’s culinary expertise and design talent.

In 2017, he attempted a 2-foot-tall Dr. Seuss-inspired fun house with a cantilevered colonnade that seemed to defy gravity. In his current midcentury-modern phase, Strong has considered re-creating the historic Kentucky Fried Chicken building in Palm Springs, with its soaring, wing-like roof, another retro-futuristic form of the era. Maybe next year.

For now, perfecting the midcentury-modern ski cabin has been a fitting holiday pursuit for the busy restaurateur and snow-starved Midwesterner, which he now does with Altonaga. You might think that constructing a gingerbread miniature would fall short of the restorative benefits that an actual decampment to a real Lake Tahoe cabin might offer, but Strong would disagree.

“I really geek out on gingerbread,” he says. “I go down a rabbit hole and all of a sudden two days have passed.”

Leilani Marie Labong is a freelance writer in San Francisco. Email: food@sfchronicle.com

Building workshop Build-your-own gingerbread ski cabin workshops with chef Anthony Strong. 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Dec. 7, 14 and 21 at Prairie, 3431 19th St., San Francisco. 415-483-1112 or http://prairiesf.com/about/. Reservations required. $150 for one house, two people.