Gooey butter cake is a dense, flat coffee cake with a sticky butter-and-sugar top, somewhere between a cake and a custard bar. It is a St. Louis bakery staple eaten any time of day.
Where to eat it: 3 restaurants across 1 city.
The cake is a St. Louis invention, most often dated to a German-American bakery in the 1930s where a baker reportedly reversed the proportions of butter and flour by mistake. Rather than throw it out, the bakery sold the dense, gooey result, and it caught on across the city's German bakeries. Today every St. Louis bakery makes a version, some with cream cheese and powdered sugar, others, like Federhofer's, without either, and Park Avenue Coffee turns out more than 70 flavours.
Common allergens: Gluten, Egg, Dairy
Tip from the editors. Pull it while the centre still wobbles; it firms as it cools and that is what keeps it gooey.
This is the TableJourney editorial recipe, modelled on the canonical bistro / counter version. The first place to try the dish in its city of origin is below.
Park Avenue Coffee roasts its own beans and pours them with more than 70 varieties of gooey butter cake, the St. Louis dessert it is best known for here.
Tip: Pair a roast with the Mom's Traditional gooey butter cake. The Lafayette Square original is the most charming branch.
Sources from: Colombia, Brazil, Ethiopia
How they serve: Espresso, Filter, Whole bean retail
Why locals love it: A suburban Affton bakery off the tourist map, Federhofer's makes a distinctive gooey butter cake without cream cheese or powdered sugar that locals adore.
Tip: Its gooey butter is a denser, old-school style than the cream-cheese versions. Come early for the freshest cases.
A family-run Italian-American bakery on The Hill, Missouri Baking Company is famous for cookies by the pound and a dense, almond-paste gooey butter cake.
Tip: It is cash-and-pickup with no online ordering; buy cookies by weight. Weekend mornings see a line of Hill regulars.
Worth the queue: Almond-paste gooey butter cake and cookies
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