The cream cheese variant of the Gooey Butter Cake recipe, while close enough to the original, is an approximation designed for easier preparation at home. Almost all bakeries in the greater Saint Louis area, including Schnucks and Dierbergs, use a slightly different recipe based on corn syrup, sugar and powdered eggs -- no cake mix or cream cheese is involved.
A legend about the cake's origin is included in Saint Louis Days...Saint Louis Nights (ISBN 0-9638298-1-5), a cookbook published in the mid-1990s by the Junior League of St. Louis. The cake was supposedly first made by accident in the 1930s by a St. Louis-area German American baker who was trying to make regular cake batter but used the wrong proportions of ingredients. |