Gooey butter cake
Gooey butter cake is a type of cake traditionally made in the U.S. city of St. Louis, Missouri, with a bottom layer of buttery yellow cake and a top layer of either egg and cream cheese, or butter and sugar. It is generally served as a type of coffee cake and not as a dessert cake. It is believed to have originated around 1943.[1]
The St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission includes a recipe for the cake on its website, calling it "one of St. Louis' popular, quirky foods"; the recipe calls for a bottom layer of butter and yellow cake, and a top layer made from eggs, cream cheese, and in this case almond extract. The cake is dusted with confectioner's sugar before being served.
The cream cheese variant of the gooey butter cake recipe, while close enough to the original, is an approximation designed for easier preparation at home. Almost all bakeries in the greater Saint Louis area, including those at grocers Schnucks and Dierbergs, use a slightly different recipe based on corn syrup, sugar and powdered eggs -- no cake mix or cream cheese is involved.
A legend about the cake's origin is included in Saint Louis Days...Saint Louis Nights (ISBN 0-9638298-1-5), a cookbook published in the mid-1990s by the Junior League of St. Louis. The cake was supposedly first made by accident in the 1930s by a St. Louis-area German American baker who was trying to make regular cake batter but reversed the proportions of sugar and flour.
The St. Louis Bread Company makes danishes with a gooey butter filling.
References
See also
External links
- Recipe from the St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission
- Recipe from scratch, from the Missouri Humanities Council website (using vanilla extract instead of almond)
- Recipe from scratch from the Junior League (sweetened with corn syrup and using evaporated milk instead of cream cheese)
- Special Foods of St. Louis MO List of foods that are unique to St Louis