Gooey butter cake
Gooey butter cake is a type of cake traditionally made in the U.S. city of St. Louis, Missouri. It is generally served as a type of coffee cake and not as a dessert cake. There are two distinct variants of the gooey butter: a bakers gooey butter and a cream cheese and 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, 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 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[citation needed].
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, 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. They sold so well, Hoffman kept producing them and soon, so did the other bakers around St. Louis.
Ozenkoski's Bakery and Panera Bread Company (original name: St. Louis Bread Company) make danish with a gooey butter filling.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ History of Gooey Butter Cake
- ^ "Ooey Gooey Butter Cake". The Sweet Art. http://www.thesweetart.com/2011/06/ooey-gooey-butter-cake.html. Retrieved 3 October 2011.
[edit] External links
- Recipe from scratch, from the Missouri Humanities Council website (using vanilla extract instead of almond)
|
|
|||||
