How a Glorious Mistake Resulted in Gooey Butter Cake: A St. Louis Tradition Since the ’40s

A little while back, I began research for a cookbook about the roots of American baking. (Shameless plug: It’s here! It’s called Midwest Made.)

I spent countless hours paging through old PTA and church cookbooks. I traveled across a dozen Midwestern states, dug through dozens of family recipe boxes, and collected thousands of recipes. But I didn’t want to simply curate a recipe list. I wanted to update the recipes as well — to refresh them, so modern bakers could enjoy them, while keeping their roots intact.

That called for eliminating a lot of the pre-packaged ingredients — which were a staple of many midcentury recipes. Let me tell you, navigating the sheer volume of cake mixes, day-glo gelatin packets, and non-dairy whipped toppings, even as a born-and-raised Midwesterner, was really something else. 

For the most part, updating these recipes was tricky, but doable. But I knew there would be a handful of iconic Midwestern recipes that presented more of a challenge than others. One of those was the beloved Gooey Butter Cake, which hails from St. Louis.

With its unique hybrid structure — a crispy-chewy foundation, a fantastically sloppy, sweet filling, and a snowy blanket of powdered sugar — it just wasn’t possible to create a book of home-baked Heartland favorites without it. The problem was that the majority of available recipes call for boxed yellow cake mix, pudding mix, and other instant ingredients many bakers would rather do without.

Now, I’m not a snob about boxed mixes (I blew half my bank account on Betty Crocker Triple Fudge Brownie Mix during both my pregnancies), but my goal for the book was clear, and a Gooey Butter Cake formula full of powder packets wasn’t going to cut it. Luckily, history was on my side. As it turns out, the most common versions of “gooey butter cake” are just shadows of what this Midwestern classic was truly meant to be. 

As it turns out, Gooey Butter Cake was never really meant to be at all. Although the exact details are unclear — and highly dependent upon who you ask — it’s estimated that the cake first appeared in the city sometime between the late 1930s and early ’40s, when St. Louis’s German population was booming, along with the number of bustling bakeries.

It was a glorious mistake when one baker, intending to make one of his bakery’s traditional German yeasted coffeecakes, made a ratio-swapping error. Far too much butter was added to the coffeecake topping in proportion to the sugar and flour. Now, the baker might have simply tossed out the ingredients and started over. But this was the war period and the cake was full of what were, at the time, likely highly rationed ingredients. Surely that contributed to the need to sell it, no matter how it turned out. And sell, it did. 

It became a must-have in no time. People in St. Louis and beyond have celebrated the deliciously wonky concept ever since, and when you make it from scratch — like the original with a yeast-based dough — it becomes more balanced in sweetness and texture, and even more lovable. Some folks serve it as a coffeecake, some as dessert. I’ll eat it whenever, especially with a few modern tweaks to improve levels of sweetness, richness, and crave-worthy chew.