St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake
I don't want to jinx myself, but I think I've finally overcome my slump in this project. I've settled on the right types of altitude adjustments to make, which tend to be more minor than major. My rule of thumb is to slightly increase the flour and liquid and slightly decrease the sugar and leavening agents, but I usually just eyeball these adjustments. When a recipe calls for, say one cup of flour and one cup of sugar, I'll add a slightly heaping cup of flour and a scant cup of sugar. To be honest, I don't really believe people who say measurements in baking have to be totally exact to the ounce. Sure, you can't dramatically change a recipe, but in my experience, I haven't noticed a significant difference in quality between when I measure with a scale and when I just use cups and spoons. I also feel like I've just gotten into the swing of things. I've developed a regular baking routine, and I'm really enjoying tackling these recipes at the pace I am. Of course, it is a great method of procrastination - it feels more productive than say, watching Netflix or YouTube, but it equally, if not more, distracts you from the many things you actually need to get done.
Today I made three very different recipes, the first of which was the St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake from Dessert Person. Well, this cake requires overnight resting, so technically I started it yesterday. Time is really becoming a blur. I had heard of gooey butter cake vaguely before making this recipe, but I'd never really been sure of its specifics - only that it was gooey and buttery. It's a regional specialty of St. Louis, Missouri, where Claire is originally from but where I have never been and have no ties to. It's essentially made up of a cakey base and a dense, gooey topping, but I'm still not sure I know what the exact traditional recipe is, or if there even is one. Claire makes it clear that she's adapted the original in some respects - her version consists of a yeasted cake batter with a buttery topping, but apparently it's commonly made with boxed cake mix and a cream cheese-based topping. If anybody is from St. Louis and is more familiar with gooey butter cake than I am, please let me know!
To be honest, I was slightly nervous to make this recipe. First of all, I'm pretty sure this is my first time ever making a recipe with yeast. I definitely have a lot more experience dessert-baking than bread-baking, and while I know this recipe isn't really a bread, anything remotely in that yeasted family is uncharted territory to me. My dad went through a pretty intense bread-baking phase at one point, and he still makes things for special occasions (the dinner rolls are his contribution to the Thanksgiving table), and I've helped him with some parts of that, so I've heard him talk about yeast and how it works. Working with yeast just feels so sciency and fussy to me, and seems like it takes a lot of coddling for it to be successful. I know yeasted cakes are a lot more common in continental Europe as opposed to chemical leaveners, which I think is part of where Claire takes inspiration from for this recipe. I've only made one European-style yeasted cake, a German bienenstich, ages ago for a school assignment, but I used a boxed mix for that.
I took a lot of precautions throughout making this recipe due to what I perceived as the fickle properties of yeast. Claire said to dissolve the yeast in lukewarm water measuring around 105 degrees. I didn't have a thermometer, so I just tried to guess what she meant by "lukewarm", afraid the yeast wouldn't activate properly. This isn't a recipe where the yeast puffs up and bubbles when dissolved - it needs sugar to feed on for that to happen, and no sugar was added during these beginning stages. Although the yeast was dissolved, there was very little movement happening. I was unsure, but I nonetheless proceeded to the next step. That's going to be a theme with this recipe.
Another reason I was nervous about this recipe was because it called for a stand mixer, and I planned on using a hand mixer. I always check Claire's YouTube videos whenever I'm making a recipe that has one - not necessarily to make sure I'm doing things right, although I do refer to them when I'm especially questioning certain things, but mostly to confirm with Claire that what I'm going to do is okay. Claire said in the video for this recipe that "you could use a hand mixer", so I took that as a green light. She probably added some type of "but..." after that, but that didn't matter to me. The batter for this cake is a lot more like a dough. It reminded me a lot of brioche dough, something that I have never made (eventually, I will have to for this project) but that I know vaguely about. It's essentially a yeast-based dough that's enriched with butter and eggs. I definitely see why Claire recommended a stand mixer - this is a very sticky, stretchy, glutinous dough. I survived with a hand mixer, but if you have access to a stand mixer I would definitely go for that first.
This dough proofs in two stages. The first stage is about an hour and a half, in which the dough rests in a warm place in covered bowl. The dough is then pressed into the pan (I halved the recipe, so I used an 8x8), covered, and rested in the fridge overnight. I was a little worried after both stages because the dough hadn't expanded as much as I imagined it would. The next morning I allowed the dough to sit on top of the heated oven for a bit, which helped a little. Ultimately, though, I don't think this is the type of dough that's suppose to rise a ton. It sprung back a little but still left a mark when I touched it, so I figured it would be fine. The second component of this cake is a very sweet, gooey topping that gets spread on before baking. Claire recommends piping it on with a pastry bag for even application, but that felt a bit fussy to me, and I had no problem simply dolloping it on and evening it out with a spatula. The topping uses largely the same ingredients as the dough, just in different proportions. It also includes corn syrup, which is apparently the secret to its gooeyness. Corn syrup is one of the ingredients that was pretty much banned in our house growing up. We weren't a real "health food" family per se, but my parents did place emphasis on foods that were natural rather than artificial. Butter and cane sugar were fine, but margarine, Splenda, and corn syrup were not. That's changed a little, now that all three of my immediate family members are cutting their sugar intake for various reasons. However, I'm an adult now and I can do whatever I want, and buying a giant bottle of corn syrup at Safeway felt like the biggest rebel move ever to me. I know it's definitely not, but to me it is.
I pretty much had no expectations for what this cake would taste like, and I was very pleasantly surprised by the outcome. While baking, the two layers create a very uneven surface of peaks and valleys, which I think are part of this cake's charm. This is a decidedly sweet cake, with its main flavor profiles being vanilla and a hint of caramel. I know I went after the last recipe I made, the salty cashew blondies, for being too sweet for me, and I don't want to sound like a hypocrite. I think this is just a different type of dessert, and the extra sweetness is really welcome in it. The cake layer itself has a very bready texture and isn't that sweet at all, so I think the very sweet and dense topping provides a welcome balance. It also adds a nice element of fudginess and moisture to a cake that, if I'm being honest, is slightly on the drier side. The cake is dusted with powdered sugar at the end, which I also think is a very welcome addition of sweetness. I was worried that the cake would still be really doughy from underproofing, but I found that the dough was very forgiving, and it was by and large the texture that I was expecting. What makes this cake really special, in my opinion, is the way the topping caramelizes and develops delightfully chewy, browned, crispy edges. If you're an edge piece kind of person, this cake is definitely for you. I don't know what it is about this cake, and especially the topping part of it, but for some reason it is so addictive to me. It's a very rich cake, and considering it's in the breakfast chapter, it feels a little too rich for me to want to start my day with it, but I think it could be a really special morning treat for special occasions as well as a nice little thing to eat with coffee or tea any time of day.
verdict: 8/10
would I make again? sure!
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