Exclusive | NYC mom Julia Kiskie wins ‘Great Borough Bake-Off’ crown for delectable version of this iconic site

She’s baking New York City into a better place.

Julia Kiskie, a 38-year-old Brooklyn mom and hotel pastry chef, has been crowned the winner of the third annual “Gingerbread NYC: The Great Borough Bake-Off” by transforming the iconic Dakota Apartments into a towering, delectable treat, The Post can exclusively reveal.

The incredible — and edible — version of the famed Upper West Side building is made from roughly 13 pounds of dense gingerbread cookie, scores of transparent gelatin sheets and countless whipped marshmallow pipings.

“It was a lot of long nights,” Kiskie of Midwood told The Post of her monumental feat.

The oven-mitted mom took home the competition’s coveted title this week, nearly two months after the Museum of the City of New York opened its exhibition of entered edible works by Kiskie and others to the public and asked visitors to cast their votes for their favorite mouthwatering creation.

Kiskie had plenty of competition. Her Dakota was up against 20 other entries featuring New York City sights, including a bite-sized sanitation truck — which was much too clean to be life-like — and the Empire State Building.

Kiskie scored roughly 20% of more than 11,000 votes cast, plenty to win the contest, according to Jerry Gallagher, the museum’s chief operating officer.

“The Dakota is one of the special ones in the gallery, and clearly it’s struck a chord with so many of the visitors,” Gallagher told The Post.

“It’s just monumental — she used all of the area that we allowed her to use, and it’s tall, just like the Dakota — as well as her detail to all of the windows and the doors and the driveway,” he noted of Kiskie’s creation.

“What a lot of people can’t see is that she actually has this Christmas tree in the center of the courtyard apartment building. … If you’ve got little kids, you can lift them up so they can see into it. She just did such an amazing job. And it’s also so wintery. Everything is covered in snow and ice, and it just looks really magical,” he said.

Kiskie said she initially set her eyes on recreating the Con-Ed building in Madison Square Garden in Manhattan but was concerned its slender build would not be structurally sound in cookie form.

That’s when Kiskie found herself gravitating toward the Dakota, the famous West 72nd Street and Central Park West co-op where legends from Lauren Bacall to Judy Garland and Connie Chung called home — and where John Lennon was ruthlessly murdered.

“I knew about that, but it was more about the history behind the actual buildings: the way they built it, how they put it together and that it was the first building in the Upper West Side that was actually made for people to live there because it was in the middle of nowhere. It was very interesting,” Kiskie said.

“My stepfather loves it, too. He actually introduced me to that building because he loves John Lennon.”

Kiskie estimated that it took roughly 200 painstaking hours for her to fashion the Dakota from dough, from the design phase to baking the gingerbread to putting it all together.

She said the process was extra strenuous because she could only work on it after she had already toiled a full day as a pastry chef at a Midtown hotel — and while getting orders done for her own home-baked-goods business, Oui Bakely.

The project was a labor of love for Kiskie, whose passion for baking was born during her childhood summers in Ukraine with her grandmother, who worked in a bakery.

After moving to the US in 2008, Kiskie honed her craft at the International Culinary Center.

She said that participating in “Gingerbread NYC: The Great Borough Bake-Off” marks her biggest undertaking to date.

“I like challenge, and I like to try new things, even though I’m kind of scared to do it. But I work really good when I am challenged or under pressure,” she said.

Kiskie finished the Dakota on Oct, 28, 2024 — just one day short of the 140th anniversary of when the real-life building was completed.

The baker said she was blindsided by her win and humbly accepted the victory as a “great honor.”

The competition runners-up this year included Irma C. Salmon’s incredible Prospect Park Boathouse and Christina Napolitano’s show-stopping depiction of Yorkville.

Other entries included a pizza box, as well as subway cars by two separate chefs, Gallagher said.

“It was really great to see not only those iconic structures but also people thinking about what else is iconic to New York,” Gallagher said.

“It’s just great in general to watch the visitors come into the space and not know to expect,” he said. “The kids will be overwhelmed with all the sugar and the icing and all the candy and things — and they are — but I really enjoy watching the older adults come in because they look at the displays, and they see the buildings they know, that they grew up around, that are in their neighborhood or there are iconic structures that they visit all the time.

“And they see them through somebody else’s eyes in a fun, creative way.”