Gooey Butter Cake

Gooey butter cake is a low-rise pastry with a tender crust around the edge and a middle that is custard-soft and supersweet. Center cuts are dripping-moist; outside segments tend to be a balance of gooeyness and plain cake. Created in the 1930s when a now-forgotten St. Louis baker mixed the wrong ingredients for a cake but decided to bake it anyway, gooey butter cake remains a continuing passion in St. Louis (but is rare anywhere else). It originally was simply yellow cake mixed with butter, cream cheese and powdered sugar; however city bakers have taken the idea and run with it. The Park Avenue Coffee Shop boasts seventy different flavors, about a dozen of which are made each day. Varieties include banana split, white chocolate raspberry, Amaretto, Butterfinger, and funky monkey. Gooey butter cake demands coffee; St. Louis Post-Dispatch food editor Judith Evans once described it as “the perfect Tupperware party food.”