What Exactly Makes Pennsylvania's Funny Cake Pie Such A Silly Dessert?

Foodies love trying dishes they've never heard of before. It's one of the reasons that culinary travel is such a big deal. Regional dishes are part of the country's culture, and visiting new destinations to try their unique foods is part of the fun. Pennsylvania, for example, has a number of unique dishes like scrapple (what is scrapple, anyway?) and the state's signature stew, pepper pot soup, but when it comes to dessert, there is one dish that is as silly as its name: funny cake pie.

This dessert is a pleasant surprise, with the joke hiding inside the dessert's unique design. Not quite cake and not quite pie, it's actually a little bit of both with a good dose of gooey chocolate thrown in for good measure to keep you on your toes. What's even funnier about it is the way some bakers make this unique dessert. When you are preparing a funny cake pie, you take a pie crust of your choice (homemade or store-bought, as long as it's a tasty one!), pour in the cake batter, then pour the chocolate sauce on top. As the dessert cooks, the chocolate sauce sinks to the bottom, and you've got one tricky dessert! Other recipes call for layering the chocolate on the bottom and carefully adding the cake batter on top so it doesn't disturb the chocolate, but either way you do it, you wind up with a unique dessert that has a fun, sweet surprise inside. Much like a complex Thanksgiving favorite, the turducken, what you see from the outside isn't necessarily what you get when it comes to funny cake pie.

Funny cake pie has Pennsylvania Dutch roots, so it's likely been a part of the region's culinary personality for a couple centuries. The Pennsylvania Dutch first arrived from Germany in the late 1600s and settled in Pennsylvania, bringing with them their culture and traditions. By passing down many family recipes from generation to generation, dishes like funny cake pie became a part of the local landscape. Some theories suggest that funny cake pie is the evolution of another Pennsylvania Dutch pie with a funny name: shoofly pie.

It's hard to know exactly when funny cake pie came to be, since the recipe was primarily passed down through generations of home cooks, but in the 1940s, this dessert officially went mainstream when Swans Down Cake Flour featured the recipe on its boxes. Today, funny cake pie may not be something you'll find in a box mix at the grocery store, but it continues to be a Pennsylvania favorite that fans swear by. The cake-slash-pie is sweet but not too sweet, putting it in the territory of a soft and fluffy coffee cake. That makes it perfect to enjoy for dessert, or you can enjoy your dessert for breakfast. Or any time in between. We're not here to judge.