St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake

Gooey butter cake has been a longtime favorite for my sister and myself, which made it the perfect recipe to bake together when she came to visit me recently. However, the St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake was a different approach to this sugary, buttery dessert (seriously, this is probably one of the sweetest, unhealthiest desserts, but you just need to get over it).

Other recipes I’ve made before are much more semi-homemade than Claire’s recipe, however there really wasn’t anything that I didn’t have on hand already for ingredients.

We started by heating up a small cup of water in the microwave, then placing it in the stand mixer with instant yeast (Claire’s ingredient list says to use active dry yeast, but the instant kind has yet to fail me in these recipes). After five minutes, the mixture was puffier and honestly kind of smelly, but I guess that means it worked?

We then added milk, sugar, salt, flour and egg yolks (Did you know you can separate an egg with a water bottle? My sister showed me and I was floored. I tried it with an egg but royally screwed it up. Better luck next time.). We mixed this until we had a mixed batter. After adding a little more flour and mixing for a bit longer, we ended up with sticky, somewhat stretchy dough. It was almost similar to the brioche dough I made for Brioche Twists with Coriander Sugar. We covered the bowl with plastic and let it rise for about two hours (Claire suggests 60 to 90 minutes, but we were having tacos for dinner, so enough said). Following Claire’s recommendations to use a glass pan, I buttered the pan before spreading the dough across the bottom. We covered it with plastic wrap again and placed it in the fridge overnight.

The next day, our dough seemed to look pretty good, but suddenly I realized something important—we still had all the butter on the counter for the entire recipe. At this point, we should have only had half of it. We reread the directions; we missed adding half the butter to the dough mixture when it was in the stand mixer! This is one mistake that was hard to undo…unless we tried to knead the butter in the dough we already had. Not wanting to start over, I got my hands oily and kneaded a stick of butter into the dough. It was certainly messy, but did seem to help a bit in making the dough size slightly larger and gooey-er. We were hopeful this could be a quick fix to the problem.

Needless to say, we paid much better attention to the directions while making the topping. This overall was very easy; we whisked the heavy cream, corn syrup and vanilla in a bowl. Then we combined the rest of the butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and salt in another bowl for five minutes. I added the egg, mixed, then added the wet mixture. We ended up with a smooth, creamy batter that seemed extremely similar to a cookie dough. In order to reduce supplies, we skipped adding the topping to a piping bag and instead used a spatula to spread it across the dough in the pan.

We baked the entire pan of sugary, buttery goodness for about a half hour. When we pulled it out of the oven, it looked just like we expected with golden brown edges. We let it cool and sprinkled some powdered sugar on top.

When my sister and I both tried it, we looked at each other a few seconds later with confusion. We could not tell if it was really done baking. With a certain expectation on what this dessert would taste like from other recipes, I think we were both surprised to find this version has a much stronger cake texture to it. Typically, the top layer and bottom layer somehow mesh into each other. Overall, our crust was not great; it simply needed the butter in the mixture before rising and sitting in the fridge. While I don’t know the answer, I have a feeling there’s a scientific reason why the butter would be beneficial in this process. It simply just did not mix the right way with the topping; however, the topping was absolutely incredible. I could’ve eaten that part alone. It’s sugary as hell, which is why I loved it (this is not a recipe for people who don’t like things overly sweet). I really want to look further into the recipe for the topping and see if it would be possible to turn it into some kind of cookie.

While I had a great time making the St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake with my sister, I’d like to give it another try sometime (seriously, how on earth did we miss the butter in a butter cake?!). The crust part deserves a second chance to prove itself, and I’m excited to see how I can forward the topping recipe one day.

Claire has a great story about how this recipe became one of her favorites; it will make you wish you were one of her childhood best friends. If only they all knew back then they were baking with a dessert prodigy! Check out her YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IR3p0CxlLg