You might be able to guess where this goes: The resulting dessert was all wrong, but the baker, pinching pennies, decided to sell it anyway, and customers thought it was just right. Gooey butter cake — the legend and the dessert — was born.
So what, exactly, is gooey butter cake? I grew up in St. Louis, eating it at potlucks and barbecues and the occasional birthday party, but for most of my life, I had no idea how to answer that question. Often, the gooey butter cake I encountered as a kid was a saccharine, dense bar cookie, with a cracked, sugary top and yellowish hue. But sometimes, if I was lucky, I happened upon a gooey butter cake that looked and tasted more like a sticky coffee cake, with two distinct layers: a less sweet, breadlike base and a creamy, gooey, honey-colored top.
They were, without question, two different desserts, and I always wondered which hewed closer to the truth, to that happy baking accident decades ago. So I decided to try to find out. And even if the creator of gooey butter cake remains a mystery, even if that original, messed-up recipe is lost to time, there’s still a trail of sticky, sweet crumbs — in newspaper archives and old recipes — that offers hints about the dessert’s murky origins.
By the late 1940s, gooey butter cake had entered the historical record, as neighborhood newspapers in St. Louis advertised the cake, often sold for 50 cents a sheet. Some referred to it as “gooey butter coffee cake,” hinting at a certain genre: Were these cakes not as sweet as other desserts and therefore acceptable for breakfast? Maybe.
Over the years, newspapers published variations on the same recipe, all relying on a yeasted base and a top layer heavy on butter, sugar and light corn syrup. That was the status quo as the cake’s celebrity spread. In 1989, a syndicated New York Times story referred to gooey butter cake as an “intensely rich piece of gastronomic lunacy” — without knowing what folly was about to take hold.
At some point, probably in the 1990s, a gooey butter cake shortcut was born, presumably to avoid the unpredictability and time suck of working with yeast. Bakers swapped the sturdy, breadlike base for a boxed, yellow cake mix, and for reasons that boggle the mind and the arteries, added cream cheese to the topping. This, then, was the gooey butter cake I encountered most often as a kid.
I’m not sure when I first tried the other gooey butter cake — dare I say, the original. But I know I was immediately swayed. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the cake mix version; it was just that I had no idea it was possible to eat gooey butter cake that had a more nuanced flavor beyond just sweetness. So banish the cream cheese and light the cake mix on fire. Working with yeast is well worth the extra effort when you wind up with something as brilliant as gooey butter cake. It’s the ideal cross between a coffee cake and a bona fide dessert — which means, of course, that it’s acceptable to eat at any time of day.
