Gooey butter cake is a type of cake traditionally made in St. Louis, Missouri. It is a flat and dense cake made with wheat cake flour, butter, sugar, and eggs, typically near an inch tall, and dusted with powdered sugar. While sweet and rich, it is somewhat firm, and is able to be cut into pieces similarly to a brownie. Gooey butter cake is generally served as a type of coffee cake and not as a formal dessert cake. There are two distinct variants of the cake: the original St. Louis, MO Bakers' gooey butter and a cream cheese and commercial yellow cake mix variant. The original St. Louis, MO Bakers' gooey butter is believed to have originated in the 1930s. It was made with a yeast-raised sweet dough on the bottom. The St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission includes a recipe for the cream cheese and commercial yellow cake mix variant cake on its website, calling it "one of St. Louis' popular, quirky foods". The recipe calls for a bottom layer of butter and yellow cake batter, and a top layer made from eggs, cream cheese, and, in one case, almond extract. The cake is dusted with confectioner's sugar before being served. The cake is best eaten soon after baking it. It should be served at room temperature or warm. The cream cheese variant of the gooey butter cake recipe (also known as "Ooey Gooey butter cake", occasionally "chess cake"), while close enough to the original, is an approximation designed for easier preparation at home. Bakeries in the greater St. Louis area who know how to make an original formula Gooey Butter cake, including those at local grocery chains Schnucks and Dierbergs, use a slightly different recipe based on corn syrup, sugar and powdered eggs; however, no cake mix or cream cheese is involved. Origin and popularity There are several claims to the creation of the cake. 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 reversed the proportions of butter and flour. John Hoffman was the owner of the bakery where the mistake was made. One story is that there were two types of butter "smears" used in his bakery: a gooey butter and a deep butter. The deep butter was used for deep butter coffee cakes. The gooey butter