Funny Cake Pie

Peek into a Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook and chances are you’ll come across several recipes with amusing names. There are beef tongue cookies, rivel soup (a creamy soup with dumplings), and schnitz and knepp (pork with apples and dumplings), to name a few. The silliest, though, may be funny cake pie, which you make by filling an unbaked pie crust with vanilla cake batter followed by a runny chocolate syrup. As the pie bakes, the ingredients in the filling “reverse” in the oven, resulting in a light, mildly sweet cake with a crunchy marbled top and a thick chocolate sauce on the bottom. Warm, buttery, and inviting, this quirky combination is a cake and a pie all in one.

What Is Funny Cake Pie?

Also known as funny cake, funny face cake, or funny pie, the dish is one of several novelty "cake pies" popular in Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine. (Another, Montgomery pie, pairs white cake with lemon-and-molasses syrup.) Local bakers claim that the pie’s name comes from its reversing layers, but as is the case for many beloved regional recipes, everyone’s version slightly differs. In fact, the origins of the name even sparked a lively debate amongst readers of Allentown, Pennsylvania's Morning Call newspaper.

Speaking to reporter Jennifer Sheehan in The Morning Call, historian William Woys Weaver theorizes that "funny cake" might be an Americanized version of a Pennsylvania Dutch name, or that the recipe might have been developed to encourage the use of cocoa powder. “[Weaver] did find in his research that the oldest name for funny cake is Cocoa Cake, probably due to the chocolatey layer,” writes Sheehan. “Since it depends on powdered chocolate as one of its most important ingredients, there is a distinct possibility that the cake was invented to promote a chocolate product.”

Funny cake pie recipes did indeed appear on product packaging: A 1940s advertisement for Swans Down cake flour describes the confection as “the very lightest, richest one-egg cake obtainable,” and offers recipes for orange and butterscotch sauces to fill the pie. Like Pennsylvania Dutch shoofly pie, this dish began as a "breakfast pie." These days, however, it's served for dessert, too, and I enjoy mine with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

5 Tips for Making Funny Cake Pie

Store-bought crust is fine. Because funny cake pie involves preparing both a pie crust and a cake batter, I usually streamline the process by reaching for store-bought pastry. But if you have homemade pie dough ready to go or prefer to make your own crust from scratch, that’s fine, too. 

Keep the crust cold. Regardless of whether you’re using a store-bought or homemade crust, be sure to chill the lined pie plate, which helps the gluten relax and minimizes the risk of the crust shrinking as it bakes. This also helps keep the butter as cold as possible; as the dough bakes, the butter melts, creating little pockets of steam that produce a crisp, flaky crust. Traditionally, funny cake pies aren’t blind baked. To prevent the crust from softening when you pour hot syrup into it, I recommend briefly freezing the crust before filling it. 

For easy pouring, make the chocolate sauce in a measuring cup. It’s one less bowl to wash, and, unlike a bowl, pouring from a spouted vessel allows you to control the drizzle. Start around the outer edge and work inward, following the trails in the batter as you go. Though it isn’t necessary, I recommend using a silicone mini whisk, which bends and flexes to reach the bottom edges.

Don't overmix. When mixing the batter, stop just after incorporating the dry ingredients and when there are no visible spots of flour remaining. Overmixing promotes gluten development, which can make the cake dense and tough when baked. 

Make a mess. Spoon the batter into the crust in big blobs, and don't worry if the surface is uneven or the crust peeks through in spots. Then, trail a knife through the batter to make it even more uneven. All of this messiness creates valleys for the chocolate to settle, distributing it evenly across the entire surface of the pie and creating a pretty marbled pattern.

 Cool slightly before serving—but not too much. Allowing the pie to cool for 30 minutes creates the ideal texture and temperature for serving: Moist cake with gooey, warm (but not scald-your-tongue hot) chocolate sauce. While the cake is nice, this recipe is all about the chocolate sauce, which thickens and soaks into the cake as it cools. Once the syrupy magic vanishes, it's gone for good, so be sure to enjoy it when it’s still warm for the full funny cake pie experience. If you’re working in a cool or air-conditioned space with an ambient temperature 74ºF (23ºC) or below, I recommend reducing the cooling time to 15 minutes.