Gooey butter cake

Gooey butter cake is a type of cake traditionally made in the American Midwest city of St. Louis. Gooey butter cake 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 gooey butter: a bakers' gooey butter and a cream cheese and commercial yellow cake mix variant. It is believed to have originated in the 1930s.

The St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission includes a recipe for the 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, while close enough to the original, is an approximation designed for easier preparation at home. Almost all bakeries in the greater St. Louis area, including those at local grocery chains Schnucks and Dierbergs, use a slightly different recipe based on corn syrup, sugar and powdered eggs — no cake mix or cream cheese is involved

Origin and popularity

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 reversed the proportions of sugar and flour.

John Hoffman was the owner of the bakery where the mistake was made. The real story is there are two types of butter "smears" used in a bakery: a gooey butter and a deep butter. The deep butter was used for deep butter coffee cakes. The gooey butter was used as an adhesive for things like Danish rolls and stollens. The gooey butter was smeared across the surface, then the item was placed in coconut, hazelnuts, peanuts, crumbs or whatever was desired so they would stick to the product.

Hoffman hired a new baker that was supposed to make deep butter cakes, but got the two butter smears mixed up. The mistake wasn't caught until after the cakes came out of the proof box. Rather than throw them away, Hoffman went ahead and baked them up. As this was around the Great Depression that was another reason to be thrifty. The new type of cake sold so well, Hoffman kept producing them and soon, so did the other bakers around St. Louis.

Another St. Louis baker, Fred Heimburger, also remembers the cake coming on the scene in the 1930s, as a slip up that became a popular hit and local acquired taste. He liked it well enough that Mr. Heimburger tried to promote Gooey butter cake by taking samples of it with him when he traveled out of St. Louis to visit other bakers in their shops. They liked it all right, but they couldn't get their customers to buy it, with reactions tending to regard it as looking too much like a mistake, and "a flat gooey mess". And so it remained as a regional favorite for many decades.

Availability

Many St. Louis area grocery stores sell fresh or boxed gooey butter cakes. Haas baking sells a widely distributed, square and packaged version in a box that depicts a colorful, if anachronistic scene of aviator Charles Lindbergh's plane the Spirit of St. Louis flying past downtown St. Louis, the Gateway Arch and the modern cityscape in clouds. Independent or family bakeries make gooey butter cakes, from a time when there were still many neighborhood corner German and Austrian American bakeries in St. Louis, in neighborhoods like Dutchtown, Bevo Mill, and the Tower Grove area, and others. There are now several businesses that specialize in different flavors of gooey butter cake and sell them in coffee shops, or to walk in customers, or by order or shipment.

Panera Bread Company (original name: St. Louis Bread Company) make Danish with a gooey butter filling. More recently, Walgreens sell wrapped, individual slices of a version of St. Louis gooey butter cake as a snack along side muffins, brownies, and cookies.

Gooey butter cake is now widely available outside of the St. Louis area, as Walmart has been marketing a version that it is calls Paula Deen Baked Goods Original Gooey Butter Cake. However, Walmart calls it "Paula's signature dessert" and makes no mention of its St. Louis origin

Gingerbread

Gingerbread is a sweet food product flavored with ginger and typically using honey or molasses (treacle) rather than just sugar. Gingerbread foods vary, ranging from a soft, moist loaf cake to something close to a ginger biscuit. The different types likely share a common origin.

Etymology

Originally, the term gingerbread (from Latin zingiber via Old French gingebras) referred to preserved ginger. It then referred to a confection made with honey and spices. Gingerbread is often used to translate the French term pain d'épices (literally "spice bread") or the German term Lebkuchen (bread of life, literally: cake of life) or Pfefferkuchen (pepperbread, literally: pepper cake). The term Lebkuchen is unspecified in the German language. It can mean Leben (life) or Laib (loaf), while the last term comes from the wide range of spices used in this product.

History

Gingerbread was brought to Europe in 992 by the Armenian monk Gregory of Nicopolis (Gregory Makar) (Grégoire de Nicopolis). He left Nicopolis Pompeii, to live in Bondaroy (France), near the town of Pithiviers. He stayed there 7 years, and taught the Gingerbread cooking to French priests and Christians. He died in 999.

During the 13th century, it was brought to Sweden by German immigrants. Early references from the Vadstena Abbey show how the Swedish nuns were baking gingerbread to ease indigestion in 1444. It was the custom to bake white biscuits and paint them as window decorations.

The first documented trade of gingerbread biscuits dates to the 16th century, where they were sold in monasteries, pharmacies and town square farmers' markets. One hundred years later the town of Market Drayton in Shropshire, UK became known for its gingerbread, as is proudly displayed on their town's welcome sign. The first recorded mention of gingerbread being baked in the town dates back to 1793; however, it was probably made earlier, as ginger was stocked in high street businesses from the 1640s. Gingerbread became widely available in the 18th century.

Gingerbread houses and decorations

The harder German-style Gingerbread is often used to build gingerbread houses similar to the "witch's house" encountered by Hansel and Gretel. The witch's name being Frau Pfefferkuchenhaus with pfefferkuchenhaus being the German name for gingerbread houses. These houses, covered with a variety of candies and icing, are popular Christmas decorations, often built by children with the help of their parents.

Since 1991, the people of Bergen, Norway, have built a city of gingerbread houses each year before Christmas. Named Pepperkakebyen(Norwegian for "gingerbread city"), it is claimed to be the world's largest such city. It's free for every child under the age of 12 to make their own house with the help of their parents. In 2009, the people of Bergen were shocked when the gingerbread city was destroyed in an act of vandalism.

Another type of model-making with gingerbread uses a boiled dough that can be molded like clay to form inedible statuettes or other decorations. Medieval bakers used carved boards to create elaborate designs.

A significant form of popular art in Europ^], major centers of gingerbread mold carvings included Lyon, Nürnberg, Pest, Prague,Pardubice, Pulsnitz, Ulm, and Toruń. Gingerbread molds often displayed the "news", showing carved portraits of new kings, emperors, and queens, for example. Substantial mold collections are held at the Ethnographic Museum in Toruń, Poland and the Bread Museum in Ulm, Germany.

Génoise cake

A génoise cake (pronounced [ʒenwaːz]; Genoese cake or Genovese cake) is an Italian sponge cake named after the city of Genoa and closely associated with Italian and French cuisine that does not use any chemical leavening, instead using air suspended in the batter during mixing to give volume to the cake. Génoise is not the same thing as pain de Gênes, which is an almond cake; however, Génoise is very close in composition and basic use to pan di Spagna ("Spanish bread"), an Italian sponge cake.

It is a whole-egg cake, unlike some other sponge cakes that beat their yolks and whites of the eggs separately; the eggs, and sometimes extra yolks, are beaten with sugar and heated at the same time using bain-marie or flame, to a stage known to patissiers as "ribbon stage". Génoise is generally a fairly lean cake, getting most of its fat from egg yolks, but some recipes also add in melted butter before baking.

Use and preparation

Génoise is a basic building block of much French pâtisserie and is used for making several different types of cake. The batter usually is baked to form a thin sheet. A 1884 cookbook gives a simple recipe for a génoise:

Work together briskly in a basin half a pound of flour, half a pound of sugar, and four eggs: after five minutes' good stirring, add a quarter of a pound of melted butter. Butter a square baking sheet, spread the paste upon it, and bake it in a moderate oven until it turns a golden yellow.

When finished baking the sheet is rolled while still warm (to make jelly rolls or Bûches de Noël), or cut and stacked into multiple layers or line a mold to be filled with a frozen dessert. A variety of fillings are used, such as jelly, chocolate, fruit,pastry cream, and whipped cream. The génoise can be piped in strips to make ladyfingers or into molds to make madeleines.

The cake is notable for its elastic and somewhat dry texture, and is sometimes soaked with flavored syrups or liqueurs and often served with a buttercream frosting. The popular tiramisu cake may be made with ladyfingers or a génoise sheet.

A chocolate génoise can be made by substituting cocoa powder for some of the flour, and is sometimes used as a substitute for the richer cake used in the standard Sacher torte recipe.

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Funing big cake

Funing big cake (阜宁大糕 [Fù níng dà gāo]) is a type of cake found in Funing County in the Jiangsu province of China. It can be served as a tea cake or it can be fried.

Funing County, Yunnan

History

Funing big cake can be dated to 2,000 years ago. It has another name, which is jade belt cake. As to the issue why is it also called so, there are two different stories. One version is that this name is given by Emperor Qianlong. After eating one slice, Emperor Qianlong spoke highly of it and gave it this name. However, another version also spread widely. Many years ago, local officials take it as a tribute delivering into the palace. Someone was promoted due to this and got a jade belt as an award. As a result, its name of jade belt cake became widely used.

Ingredients

Its raw materials are traditionally sticky rice, white sugar and refined lard. Due to health concerns associated with lard consumption, sometimes vegetable oil is used instead of lard. Sometimes the cake also contains pine nuts, semen juglandis or other ingredients as burdenings.

Fruit cake

Fruit cake (or fruitcake) is a cake made with chopped candied fruit and/or dried fruit, nuts, and spices, and (optionally) soaked inspirits. A cake that simply has fruit in it as an ingredient can also be colloquially called a fruit cake. In the United Kingdom, certain rich versions may be iced and decorated. Fruit cakes are often served in celebration of weddings and Christmas.

History

The earliest recipe from ancient Rome lists pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, and raisins that were mixed into barley mash. In the Middle Ages, honey, spices, and preserved fruits were added.

Fruit cakes soon proliferated all over Europe. Recipes varied greatly in different countries throughout the ages, depending on the available ingredients as well as (in some instances) church regulations forbidding the use of butter, regarding the observance of fast. Pope Innocent VIII (1432–1492) finally granted the use of butter, in a written permission known as the 'Butter Letter' or Butterbrief in 1490, giving permission to Saxony to use milk and butter in the North German Stollen fruit cakes.

Star Fruit Cake

Starting in the 16th century, sugar from the American Colonies (and the discovery that high concentrations of sugar could preserve fruits) created an excess of candied fruit, thus making fruit cakes more affordable and popular.