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.
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.
