gooey butter cake
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Gooey butter cake is a type of cake traditionally made in
St. Louis, Missouri St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...
. It is a flat and dense cake made with wheat cake flour,
butter Butter is a dairy product made from the fat and protein components of churned cream. It is a semi-solid emulsion at room temperature, consisting of approximately 80% butterfat. It is used at room temperature as a spread, melted as a condimen ...
, sugar, and
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, typically near an inch tall, and dusted with
powdered sugar Powdered sugar, also called confectioners' sugar, or icing sugar, is a finely ground sugar produced by milling granulated sugar into a powdered state. It usually contains between 2% and 5% of an anti-caking agent – such as corn starch, p ...
. 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 Coffee cake may refer to a sponge cake flavored with coffee or, in the United States, a sweet cake intended to be eaten with coffee or tea (similar to tea cake). A coffee-flavored cake is typically baked in a circular shape with two layers sep ...
and not as a formal dessert cake. There are two distinct variants of the cake: the original St. Louis, MO Bakers' gooey butter and a cream cheese and commercial yellow cake mix variant. The original St. Louis, MO Bakers' gooey butter is believed to have originated in the 1930s. It was made with a yeast-raised sweet dough on the bottom. The St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission includes a recipe for the cream cheese and commercial yellow cake mix variant cake on its website, calling it "one of St. Louis' popular, quirky foods". The recipe calls for a bottom layer of
butter Butter is a dairy product made from the fat and protein components of churned cream. It is a semi-solid emulsion at room temperature, consisting of approximately 80% butterfat. It is used at room temperature as a spread, melted as a condimen ...
and yellow
cake batter Batter is a flour mixture with liquid and other ingredients such as sugar, salt and leavening agent, leavening used for cooking. It usually contains more liquid than doughs, which are also mixtures of flour and liquid. Batters are usually a po ...
, and a top layer made from eggs,
cream cheese Cream cheese is a soft, usually mild-tasting fresh cheese made from milk and cream.Oxford English Dictionary Stabilizers such as carob bean gum and carrageenan are often added in industrial production. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration de ...
, 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. The cream cheese variant of the gooey butter cake recipe (also known as "Ooey Gooey butter cake", occasionally "chess cake"), while close enough to the original, is an approximation designed for easier preparation at home.
Bakeries A bakery is an establishment that produces and sells flour-based food baked in an oven such as bread, cookies, cakes, donuts, pastries, and pies. Some retail bakeries are also categorized as cafés, serving coffee and tea to customers who w ...
in the greater St. Louis area who know how to make an original formula Gooey Butter cake, including those at local grocery chains
Schnucks Schnucks is a supermarket chain. Based in the St. Louis area, the company was founded in 1939 with the opening of a store in north St. Louis and currently operates over 100 stores in four states throughout the Midwest (Missouri, Illinois, Indi ...
and Dierbergs, use a slightly different recipe based on corn syrup, sugar and powdered eggs; however, no cake mix or cream cheese is involved.


Origin and popularity

There are several claims to the creation of the cake. 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 butter and flour. John Hoffman was the owner of the bakery where the mistake was made. One story is that there were two types of butter "smears" used in his 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 The hazelnut is the fruit of the hazel tree and therefore includes any of the nuts deriving from species of the genus ''Corylus'', especially the nuts of the species ''Corylus avellana''. They are also known as cobnuts or filberts according ...
,
peanut The peanut (''Arachis hypogaea''), also known as the groundnut, goober (US), pindar (US) or monkey nut (UK), is a legume crop grown mainly for its edible seeds. It is widely grown in the tropics and subtropics, important to both small and ...
s, crumbs or whatever was desired so they would stick to the product. Hoffman hired a new baker who was supposed to make deep butter cakes, but got the butter smears mixed up. The mistake was not caught until after the cakes came out of the proof box. Rather than throw them away, Hoffman went ahead and baked them. This baking mistake was made during the Great Depression, which meant supplies for baking ingredients were low. The new cake sold so well that Hoffman kept baking and selling 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 An acquired taste is an appreciation for something unlikely to be enjoyed by a person who has not had substantial exposure to it. It is the opposite of innate taste, which is the appreciation for things that are enjoyable by most persons without ...
. He liked it well enough that 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, but they could not get their customers to buy it. Their reactions tending to regard it as looking too much like a mistake, and "a flat gooey mess". As such, so it remained as a regional favorite for many decades. Other stories surround the cake's creation; none have been historically verified. Gooey butter cake is also commonly known outside of the St. Louis area as "ooey gooey butter cake", due to its popularization by celebrity chef
Paula Deen Paula Ann Hiers Deen (born January 19, 1947) is an American chef, cookbook author, and TV personality. Deen resides in Savannah, Georgia, where she owns and operates The Lady & Sons restaurant and Paula Deen's Creek House with her sons, Jamie ...
.


Availability

Many St. Louis area grocery stores sell fresh or boxed gooey butter cakes. Haas Baking sold a widely distributed, square and packaged version in a box that depicts a colorful, if
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scene of aviator
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's plane the '' Spirit of St. Louis'' flying past downtown St. Louis, the
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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
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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.
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Company (original name: St. Louis Bread Company) makes a
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with a gooey butter filling for the St. Louis market. More recently,
Walgreens Walgreen Company, d/b/a Walgreens, is an American company that operates the second-largest pharmacy store chain in the United States behind CVS Health. It specializes in filling prescriptions, health and wellness products, health information, a ...
sells wrapped, individual slices of a version of St. Louis gooey butter cake as a snack alongside muffins, brownies, and cookies. Gooey butter cake is now widely available outside of the St. Louis area, as
Walmart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquarter ...
has been marketing a version called
Paula Deen Paula Ann Hiers Deen (born January 19, 1947) is an American chef, cookbook author, and TV personality. Deen resides in Savannah, Georgia, where she owns and operates The Lady & Sons restaurant and Paula Deen's Creek House with her sons, Jamie ...
Baked Goods Original Gooey Butter Cake. While Walmart still sells a gooey butter cake, they dropped the Paula Deen version. Gooey butter cake ("butter cake") is also widely popular in German-style bakeries throughout the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area, as well as down the Jersey shore. Wawa has started selling different flavors of individually-wrapped gooey butter cakes. Modern versions of this confection, originally sold as a breakfast pastry or "coffee cake", have shown up on upscale restaurant menus across the Midwest and even the West coast.


In popular culture

On the SyFy television series '' Defiance'', Nolan and Rafe discuss gooey butter cake while in Old St. Louis in the episode " Down In the Ground Where the Dead Men Go". It was featured on an episode of '' Pizza Masters'' titled "Leave Me in St. Louis".


See also

*
Butter cake A butter cake is a cake in which one of the main ingredients is butter. Butter cake is baked with basic ingredients: butter, sugar, eggs, flour, and leavening agents such as baking powder or baking soda. It is considered one of the quintessentia ...
* Butterkuchen, the yeasted, German coffeecake that is topped with flecks of butter * Chess pie, a similar dessert in the form of a pie *
Coffee cake Coffee cake may refer to a sponge cake flavored with coffee or, in the United States, a sweet cake intended to be eaten with coffee or tea (similar to tea cake). A coffee-flavored cake is typically baked in a circular shape with two layers sep ...
*
Kuchen Kuchen (), the German word for cake, is used in other languages as the name for several different types of savory or sweet desserts, pastries, and gateaux. Most Kuchen have eggs, flour and sugar as common ingredients while also, but not always, ...
, the German name for cakes, the coffee cake style which may be similar to the base cake that Gooey butter cake developed from * Philadelphia Butter Cake, a North Philadelphia cake similar to Gooey Butter cake * Smearcase, a Baltimore cheesecake served in bar form that resembles Gooey Butter Cake *
St. Louis cuisine St. Louis cuisine is the culinary culture of the Greater St. Louis area, which comprises and completely surrounds the independent city of St. Louis (its principal city) and includes parts of both the U.S. states of Missouri and Illinois. Hist ...


References


External links

* (with recipe) * Controversy over a television cook laying claim to Gooey butter cake described {{Cakes, state=collapsed Cuisine of St. Louis Cuisine of the Midwestern United States American cakes Butter cakes