Anger Burger

I debated not telling you about this.  Because why tell you if I’m just going to change it?  I like to pretend it’s a little heroic, like I’m doing you a favor, but mostly I’m lazy.

When I was at my mom’s house I watched an episode of Food Feuds, a program on the Food Network hosted by Chef Michael Symon.  In it he compares two versions of the same popular local goods.  Example: two different cheesesteak restaurants in Philadelphia.   Or, in this case, two different “gooey butter cake” joints in St. Louis, Missouri.  The program stopped me in my tracks, because I have never heard of this before.  I realize it’s a local thing, but I’ve really never heard of it before.  I was mesmerized as the program showed their construction of it: a rich traditionally-textured cake batter on the bottom, topped with what was basically just a super-rich cheesecake batter.  When baked, the two layers combine a smidge, but mostly what you get is cake on the bottom and, indeed, a gooey-sweet layer on top.  It looked amazing and I needed it fucking immediately.

Back home, some Google-fu showed me what I should have known: everyone else already knows about this.  Smitten Kitchen discovered it through the New York Times over a year ago.

The weird part is that 99% of the recipes are something I’d never make, and were most assuredly not what the folks on the TV show were cooking: a base of store-bought yellow cake mix topped with a cream cheese layer.  I mean, the first recipe hit when you Google it is Paula Deen’s, for fuck’s sake (with an accompanying photo that looks NOTHING like what everyone else’s cakes look like, of course).  But the recipe that Smitten Kitchen used, the New York Times’ Melissa Clark’s version, was a yeasted cake base with a cream-cheese-less topping.  What is going on here?  On one hand we have most of the internet saying it has a cream cheese topping, but the two authorities of food I trust a little more are saying no cream cheese topping.  That this somehow makes a more “adult” and palatable product.

I call shenanigans.

But first, I gotta put the butter cake where my mouth is.

I like that Melissa Clark has a yeasted cake layer, but there are problems.  More on that in a minute while I address the first problem: the cake requires three hours of rising.  Three hours!  This is kind of bullshit.  I mean, I enjoy spending hours in the kitchen, but even I think it’s silly that the first step alone will take up nearly four hours of your time (that’s an hour for mixing and clean-up, assuming you’re as distractable and lazy as me).

But we’ll move beyond that in the interest of science, and because I’ll be the first person in line for something that requires a 6 hour wait, as long as that something is EPIC RAD.

After the base rises, it gets a layer of… another cake batter.  This time its a lot of butter and sugar – a lot – and a lot of vanilla.  A LOT.  Just those two notes of sugar and vanilla, nothing else.  And here’s my second point of oh-hell-no: just that?  No sour cream cheese hit?  Not even some lemon juice?  I haven’t eaten this yet and I can already tell you that it’s missing something.  Still, I do it.  Because I am a turd and I want to prove my point.  It bakes up crazy, by the way.  There was a thrilling moment when I was sure it was going to spill over the pan, but it didn’t.

The final cake is beautiful, too.  And smells even better, the Viking came smashing in from the other room demanding to know what was happening and why he wasn’t eating it already.

Straight from the oven, I must admit this cake is a thing of beauty.  While still warm, the edges are chewy and sugary, the cake is soft and the topping is indeed gooey.  But here’s where my fears are confirmed: it’s sweet.  Too sweet.  And “too sweet” I can handle if there’s anything else happening in the flavor profile, and there just wasn’t.  It was like packing your mouth with marshmallows.

The second fear was a little unexpected and goes back to my problems with the yeast layer: sucker is dry.  The bottom nearly burned before the top was done, something Smitten Kitchen also experienced but blamed on having used a metal pan.  I used a glass pan, moved the pan to the top of the oven and still had the problem.  It was easily ignorable but bespoke of a deeper issue – the overall dryness of the yeast layer.  Straight from the oven it was delicious and soft, but after cooling and particularly the next day, it was like eating week-old bread.

My sad conclusion is that the recipe is flawed.  There may not actually be a way to gentrify this.  And I’m not sure that makes me sad, to be honest – maybe this recipe is just destined for the picnic table, the thing you make once or twice a year at most, and never for esteemed company.  Or you do, but with a drunken wink to how ridiculous it is.

Still, I’m not abandoning it.  I’m infatuated with the idea of a cakey-layer/gooey-layer confection.  I’m not done yet.

(Again, here’s this version, if you’re interested.)