Sometimes you need a break from the craziness of this modern age, which is why we're celebrating nostalgic foods this week at BonAppetit.com.
I’ve never seen senior food editor Rick Martinez more perplexed than when he attempted his first ooey gooey butter cake in the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen. First of all, he had no idea what it was. My only suggestions were: Buy cake mix, add butter, add a block of cream cheese. That’s the polar opposite of the Bon Appétit ethos, in which every recipe is its best possible version—tested and cross-tested until deemed perfect—no cake mix allowed. That’s why BA is BA, and I’m not trying to change that or anything by throwing store-bought yellow cake mix into the ring, but that’s what ooey gooey butter cake just is. Or so I thought.
My go-to recipe is from Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar Life. Her grandma’s pumpkin ooey gooey butter cake can be made without pumpkin. It goes something like this: Measure a small portion of yellow cake mix, add melted butter, and press it into a crust at the bottom of a cake pan. Bake that until you get a cookie-ish texture. Then add more butter and a block of cream cheese to the rest of the cake mix for the goo. Bake that on the crust and boom. The crowd goes wild. Yes, I’ve done it with funfetti.
But Rick dove deep. Who’s the inventor of this thing and how is his/her blood sugar level now?
Well, it’s debatable, but St. Louis is where the legend takes us. The story goes like this: A baker during the Depression made a mistake. A cake’s proportions of butter to flour were out of whack, and what resulted was a gooey, buttery, almost-pudding cake. While we can’t trace the exact baker by name, two stories appear side by side along those lines at the blog What’s Cooking America. Over at the New York Times, Melissa Clark’s St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake uses a yeasted cake base.
So Rick went forth trying to re-create the perfect gooey mistake. Where the “ooey” came in, history DEFINITELY doesn’t know, but we’ll take it. It took five cakes before Rick was ready to put one out for a tasting. He’d increase the butter, decrease the flour, and then wait. In one test, he looked in the oven and the cake was “boiling! Bubbling like gurgling lava! It was a scene from hell.” Rick has a flair for storytelling. But he waited it out and 15 minutes later, the goo was set. And it was delicious. The cake was made again for a cross test and then a few more for photo shoots. In total, nine ooey gooey butter cakes were baked in the test kitchen, making it the best month of our collective lives.
In this recipe, to avoid “flavor monotony” (great Twitter handle idea) between the cake and goo, the cake base has brown sugar and sour cream for tang and nuttiness, while the goo has sugar, butter, vanilla, and golden syrup for caramel-like flavor. It ends up looking like the surface of another planet, and that’s a very, very good thing.
Just make it already:
