A slice of an atypical contemporary Gooey butter cake, flavored with pumpkin, and garnished with whipped cream, instead of powdered sugar

Gooey butter cake is a type of cake traditionally made in the American Midwest city of St. Louis. Gooey butter cake is a flat and dense cake made with wheat cake flour, butter and eggs, typically near an inch tall, and dusted with powdered sugar. While sweet and rich, it is somewhat firm, and is able to be cut into pieces similarly to a brownie. Gooey butter cake is generally served as a type of coffee cake and not as a formal dessert cake. There are two distinct variants of the gooey butter: a bakers' gooey butter and a cream cheese and commercial yellow cake mix variant. It is believed to have originated in the 1930s.^[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 batter, and a top layer made from eggs, cream cheese, and, in one case, almond extract. The cake is dusted with confectioner's sugar before being served. The cake is best eaten soon after baking it. It should be served at room temperature or warm.^[2]

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 St. Louis area, including those at local grocery chains Schnucks and Dierbergs, use a slightly different recipe based on corn syrup, sugar and powdered eggs — no cake mix or cream cheese is involved^{[citation needed]}.

Origin and popularity[link]

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.

John Hoffman was the owner of the bakery where the mistake was made. The real story is there are two types of butter "smears" used in a bakery: a gooey butter and a deep butter. The deep butter was used for deep butter coffee cakes. The gooey butter was used as an adhesive for things like Danish rolls and stollens. The gooey butter was smeared across the surface, then the item was placed in coconut, hazelnuts, peanuts, crumbs or whatever was desired so they would stick to the product.

Hoffman hired a new baker that was supposed to make deep butter cakes, but got the two butter smears mixed up. The mistake wasn't caught until after the cakes came out of the proof box. Rather than throw them away, Hoffman went ahead and baked them up. As this was around the Great Depression that was another reason to be thrifty. The new type of cake sold so well, Hoffman kept producing them and soon, so did the other bakers around St. Louis.

Another St. Louis baker, Fred Heimburger, also remembers the cake coming on the scene in the 1930s, as a slip up that became a popular hit and local acquired taste. He liked it well enough that Mr. Heimburger tried to promote Gooey butter cake by taking samples of it with him when he traveled out of St. Louis to visit other bakers in their shops. They liked it all right, but they couldn't get their customers to buy it, with reactions tending to regard it as looking too much like a mistake, and "a flat gooey mess".^[3] And so it remained as a regional favorite for many decades.

Availability[link]

Many St. Louis area grocery stores sell fresh or boxed gooey butter cakes. Haas baking sells a widely distributed, square and packaged version in a box that depicts a colorful, if anachronistic scene of aviator Charles Lindbergh's plane the Spirit of St. Louis flying past downtown St. Louis, the Gateway Arch and the modern cityscape in clouds. Independent or family bakeries make gooey butter cakes, from a time when there were still many neighborhood corner German and Austrian American bakeries in St. Louis, in neighborhoods like Dutchtown, Bevo Mill, and the Tower Grove area, and others. There are now several businesses that specialize in different flavors of gooey butter cake and sell them in coffee shops, or to walk in customers, or by order or shipment.

Panera Bread Company (original name: St. Louis Bread Company) make Danish with a gooey butter filling. More recently, St. Louis area locations of Walgreens sell wrapped, individual slices of a version of St. Louis gooey butter cake as a snack along side muffins, brownies, and cookies.

See also[link]

• Coffee cake
• Kuchen the German name for cakes, the coffee cake style of which may be similar to the base cake that Gooey butter cake developed from

References[link]

External links[link]

• A Butter Cake That Sticks to the Gums from the New York Times, April 19, 1989 (with recipe)
• Recipe from scratch, from the Missouri Humanities Council website (using vanilla extract instead of almond)
• Paula Deen DID NOT Create Gooey Butter Cake ! Controversy over a television cook laying claim to Gooey butter cake described

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Hazelnut brown butter cake

A butter cake is a cake in which one of the main ingredients is butter. Butter cakes consist of taking the most basic of ingredients butter, sugar, eggs, flour, and a leavening agent (baking powder or baking soda) and transforming them into a baked good.

These cakes are considered one of the quintessential cakes in American baking.^{[citation needed]} They find their origins in the English pound cake, which traditionally used equal parts of butter, flour, sugar, and eggs to produce a heavy, rich cake.

History [link]

The invention of baking powder and other chemical leavening agents during the 19th century substantially increased the flexibility of this traditional pound cake by introducing the possibility of creating lighter, fluffier cakes using these traditional combinations of ingredients, and it is this transformation that brought about the modern butter cake.

Recipe[link]

Butter cakes are traditionally made using a creaming method, in which the butter and sugar are first beaten until fluffy to incorporate air into the butter. Eggs are then added gradually, creating an emulsion, followed by alternating portions of wet and dry ingredients. Butter cakes are often considered to be unsurpassed in their richness and moistness when stored at room temperature, but they tend to stiffen, dry out, and lose flavor when refrigerated, making them unsuitable for filling or frosting in advance with ingredients that must be refrigerated, such as cream cheese frosting and pastry cream.

References [link]

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2010)

v t e Cakes Butter cakes Devil's food cake Gooey butter cake Pound cake Cheesecakes Ostkaka Chocolate cakes Black Forest cake Flourless chocolate cake Fudge cake Garash cake German chocolate cake Joffre cake Kladdkaka Molten chocolate cake Sachertorte Fruitcakes Black bun Bolo rei Dundee Cake Panforte Layer cakes Angel cake Buckwheat gateau Dobos torte Esterhazy torte Hot milk cake Kiev cake Mille-feuille Princess Cake Prinzregententorte Rainbow cake Spekkoek Kuih Lapis Spit cakes Baumkuchen Kürtőskalács (Chimney cake) Šakotis Spettekaka Trdelník Sponge cakes Angel food cake Battenberg cake Boston cream pie Castella Chiffon cake Frankfurter Kranz French Fancy Frog cake Génoise cake Lamington Madeira cake Madeleine Mantecadas Marble cake Opera cake Pandan cake Paper wrapped cake Red velvet cake Rum cake Shortcake Spice cake Swiss roll Tres leches cake Upside-down cake Yeast cakes Babka Banana bread Banbury cake Chorley cake Date and walnut loaf Eccles cake Flies graveyard Rum baba Streuselkuchen Sweetheart cake Welsh cake Special occasions Birthday cake Buccellato Bûche de Noël (Christmas) Christmas cake Doberge cake Groom's cake King cake (Mardi Gras) Lekach (Rosh Hashanah) Marry girl cake Mooncake (Mid-Autumn Festival) Pan de Pascua (Christmas) Simnel cake (Easter) Soul cake (All Saints Day) Stack cake (Wedding) Stollen Wedding cake Others Apple cake Bizcocho Bulla cake Bundt cake Carrot cake Coconut cake Coffee cake Croquenbouche Cupcake Dacquoise Erotic cake Game cake Gingerbread Gugelhupf Heavy cake Ice cream cake Jaffa Cakes Lolly cake Muffin Pain d'épices Parkin Pavlova Petit four Punschkrapfen Ruske kape Šampita Krempita Teacake Tompouce