Recreating Philadelphia's buttery cakey goodness
April 13, 2021 8:18 AM   Subscribe

Several years ago, I bought a piece of butter cake from a vendor at the Reading Terminal Market, in Philadelphia. It was magical, how good it was. I want to recreate it, but I can't find a recipe that exactly matches my memory...

What I got was clearly closer to Philadelphia Butter Cake (like this), rather than St. Louis style gooey butter cake (like this). I don't believe there was any cream cheese in it.

The biggest thing is: every recipe I find has very obviously distinction in layers. There's the bready/cakey layer, and the gooey top layer. The butter cake I got in Philedelphia, however, wasn't like that. Yes, there were two separate layers, but they were much closer in consistency and appearance than you get from the recipes I've found. It wasn't like you could look at it and go, "Yes, here is a gooey layer on top of a cakey/bready layer." Instead, what I got in Philadelphia at first hit the senses as a single, solid mass, and then only through reflection and careful inspection revealed itself to have two separate layers within it. In other words, it was after a few bites that I realized, "Hey! The top part is kinda different from the bottom part!"

Any ideas what kind of variant on butter cake it was? Have a recipe? Or any suggestions about how I could alter the Philadelphia Butter Cake recipe I linked above, to get it closer to what I remember?
posted by meese to Food & Drink (10 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Is it more like this Amish butter cake?

There are several Amish vendors at Reading Terminal so I'd bet you got it from one of them.
posted by DoubleLune at 8:40 AM on April 13, 2021 [1 favorite]


Or maybe a German butter cake - where the layers would be created with the butter/heavy cream topping?
posted by DoubleLune at 8:43 AM on April 13, 2021


unless you tasted the yeast, it's not phil. style. st. louis style with the batter too liquid and *very* slightly overcooked.or maybe cooked at too low a temp. both errors tend to obscure the layers.

my fam is from stl and i have made their recipe at least 100 times. still - i could be wrong!
posted by j_curiouser at 8:49 AM on April 13, 2021


Response by poster: Both the Amish butter cake and the German butter cake look really cakey, whereas what I had was denser, more fudgey. The top of it looked crinkley/broken up, like I see in pictures of Philadelphia-style butter cake.

(Yes, I'm going to have to try all of these recipes! They look delicious, even if they don't look like what I remember.)
posted by meese at 8:52 AM on April 13, 2021


Any chance it was from Flying Monkey Bakery?
posted by knile at 8:58 AM on April 13, 2021


the cracked top is the cream cheese/egg mixture cooling. if you leave it in too long this won't happen. it should be a tad jiggly when you take it out, then it cools forming the nice cracked top.
posted by j_curiouser at 9:03 AM on April 13, 2021


Response by poster: I can't remember if I got it from Flying Monkey Bakery or another vendor, but their butter cake looks exactly like what I'm after! How do I achieve that?
posted by meese at 9:03 AM on April 13, 2021


make 1/3 or 1/4 the topping. maybe even less. it's the same stuff but thinner by the looks. then trim the sides after it cools to make it neat. this is a ugly bake on the edges - crisper and browner. chef knife dipped in cold water.
posted by j_curiouser at 10:46 AM on April 13, 2021


I think you're looking for the kind of butter pound cake served at Stocks Bakery?
posted by erattacorrige at 1:02 PM on April 13, 2021


Maybe this recipe?https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2012/04/philadelphia-butter-cake-bars-recipe.html
Looks like someone from Flying Monkey says it's a picture of their cake in the comments but they don't use yeast.

Butter cake seems to vary even in the same neighborhood. Termini is the other bakery at the Terminal that might have it, but I bet it was Flying Monkey. I don't think I've ever seen it at Beiler's (the Amish one).

Stock's does have a butter cake, it's different from their pound cake. Their butter cake almost looks like a small tray of blonde brownies.
posted by sepviva at 7:05 PM on April 14, 2021


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