St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake
It doesn’t look quite done, but it’s supposed to be gooey.
A cake that’s gooey on purpose is an interesting prospect, let’s try it.
Time: 4 hours + 11 hours cold rise
Difficulty: 1/5
Ingredient Availability: 5/5
I’d seen the video of Claire Saffitz making this cake a while ago and intended to give it a try but never got around to it until recently. A purposely gooey cake just sounds kinda good to me and the pictures looked good too. I’m always up for trying something new in the kitchen, so this holiday season I decided to finally give this cake a try.
Key Ingredients & Omissions:
Base Dough Ingredients
These ingredients look a lot like a brioche dough
Topping Ingredients
I used honey instead of corn syrup.
None of the ingredients are all that special, but considering that butter is supposed to be one of the main flavors of the cake, maybe use a higher quality one. One substitution I made was honey for the light corn syrup. I thought I had enough, but once I brought it out to use, I couldn’t get any out. I think honey worked just fine as a substitute.
Tools:
13x9” pan
Cooking Review:
Cake Dough: 2 hours 30 Minutes
After letting the yeast sit in some warm water for about 5 minutes, all of the rest of the dough ingredients were added to the stand mixer and mixed with the paddle attachment until combined. The butter was added piece by piece next. Once incorporated, additional flour was added little by little and mixed with the dough hook until the dough just began to pull away from the sides of the bowl. At this point, I let the dough rise for about 2 hours before transferring to the buttered pan and refrigerating overnight.
Making Topping: 30 Minutes
To make the topping, all the ingredients for the topping (except for the heavy cream, vanilla, flour, and honey) were added to the stand mixer with the paddle attachment. I was supposed to add the egg after mixing the butter and sugar, but I put it in early, which I don’t think made much of a difference. The flour and cream mixture were then added in, alternating them and mixed until combined. Instead of using a piping bag to top the cake, I just spooned it on top of the dough, which had been sitting out while I made the topping, and spread it with an offset spatula.
Baking: 48 minutes
I baked the cake for 48 minutes. At this point the cake just slightly jiggled in the middle and I could see some wet spots poking through the cracks. I didn’t put any powdered sugar on once I served it.
Analysis:
Analysis:
Slightly warm, the cake is pretty interesting. There is a clear distinction between the gooey topping and the bread cake part. The gooey part is the star of the show, providing just about all the moisture, flavor, and sweetness. The bread part was like a dry cornbread without the cornmeal with very little sweetness. Everyone who tried the cake was a big fan of the gooey topping but felt that the other part was pretty disappointing. If each bite was exactly 50/50 each part, I think this wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but some parts were a lot more of the disappointing part than the tasty gooey parts. Overall, I think this cake is ok. I don’t think I would make it again, but I can’t say that I hate it. If the cake part was better and could stand up too the gooey topping, this would be a lot better. I’m giving this a recipe a 6/10. It was worth giving a try once, but not good enough to come back to.
