Gooey Butter Cake is a sticky, sweet treat from St. Louis

Legend has it that the gooey butter cake was created by accident, at some unspecified time in the first half of the 20th century in St. Louis, in an unnamed bakery, with an unspecified set of ingredients. A baker got lost while making a cake. The details of this legend are lost in the mists of time.

You can probably guess what happened: The resulting dessert was completely wrong, but the baker, saving money, decided to sell it anyway, and customers thought it was perfect. The gooey butter cake—the legend and the dessert—was born.

So what is gooey butter cake? I grew up in St. Louis, eating it at potlucks, barbecues, and the occasional birthday party, but for most of my life, I had no idea what the answer to that question was. Often, the gooey butter cake I encountered as a kid was a dense, sweet bar cookie with a sugary, crackly top and a yellowish hue. But sometimes, if I was lucky, I would come across a gooey butter cake that looked and tasted more like a sticky coffee cake, with two distinct layers: a less sweet, bread-like base and a creamy, gooey, honey-colored top.

Get the recipe: Butter cake with a runny heart

They were definitely two different desserts, and I’ve always wondered which one was more true to the truth, to that happy baking accident that happened decades ago. So I decided to try to find out. And while the creator of the gooey butter cake remains a mystery, and that original failed recipe has been lost to time, there’s a trail of sticky, sugary crumbs—in newspaper archives and old recipes—that offer clues to the dessert’s murky origins.

By the late 1940s, the gooey butter cake had entered the annals of history, with St. Louis neighborhood newspapers advertising the cake, often selling for 50 cents a sheet. Some called it “gooey butter coffee cake,” hinting at a certain genre: Weren’t these cakes as sweet as other desserts and therefore acceptable for breakfast? Perhaps.

Over the years, newspapers have published variations on the same recipe, all based on a yeast base and a rich top layer of butter, sugar, and light corn syrup. That was the status quo when the cake first became famous. In 1989, a syndicated New York Times article called the gooey butter cake “an intensely rich piece of gastronomic madness” — little did it know what madness was about to take over.

At some point, probably in the 1990s, a shortcut for gooey butter cake emerged, probably to avoid the unpredictability and time-consuming process of working with yeast. Bakers swapped the sturdy, bread-like base for a boxed yellow cake mix and, for reasons that boggle the mind and the arteries, added cream cheese to the filling. So that was the gooey butter cake I encountered most often as a kid.

I don’t know when I first tried the other one. Gooey Butter Cake—dare I say, the original. But I know I was immediately smitten. It’s not that I didn’t like the cake mix version; I just had no idea it was possible to eat a gooey butter cake with a more nuanced flavor beyond simple sweetness. So banish the cream cheese and fire up the cake mix. Working with yeast is well worth the extra effort when you end up with something as brilliant as gooey butter cake. It’s the perfect cross between a coffee cake and a full-blown dessert—which, of course, means it’s acceptable to eat at any time of day.

Get the recipe: Butter cake with a runny heart

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