It is a bright, spring day in 2003 and I am happy to be starting a new chapter for our young family in Charleston, putting down roots in my hometown after living in Vermont. With the kids tucked away at my parent’s house and my husband busy at his new job, I unpack with fervor, ignoring hunger pangs to get the job done when the doorbell rings.
I open the door and see a perfect ring of cake. A Bundt cake to be precise, its moistness sealed inside a golden crust, dusted with powdered sugar and studded with lemon zest. The glorious, tender cake almost obscures the paper plate that holds it. I feel my mouth water before I remember my manners and invite my new neighbor inside. If first impressions are the most important, then receiving this sunny Bundt cake has sealed her fate as my most endearing friend.
The simple gift of this golden-ringed cake with its welcoming lemon-vanilla scent makes me feel instantly at home and connected to my neighborhood. It makes me feel a part of something larger.
My mother made Bundt cakes, often glazed with chopped pecans, cinnamon, and brown sugar, tastes my younger palate didn’t appreciate but that I now crave. I would carefully dissect the nuts from the sticky-sweet cinnamon streusel, pushing each bite of tender, yellow cake into a bit of gooey topping.
Bundt cakes were all the rage in the late sixties and seventies when my mother was in her thirties with five young children in tow. She knew what many other women had discovered: Bundt cakes come together quickly, are easy to transport, and are elegant showstoppers, making even the most modest home cook look like a prize-winning baker. Rather than spend time carefully stacking and icing round cake layers, Bundt pans offer ease and simplicity with similar grandeur.
Bundt cakes are named bringing people together. Dave Dalquist, who founded Nordic Ware baking products with his wife, designed the Bundt pan after being approached by a Jewish women’s group in Minnesota who craved Kugelhopf cakes made in their native Germany.
We may adapt to new places, but we often yearn for what we left behind, especially if it tasted delicious. Kugelhopf cakes were baked in heavy, tubular, fluted pans. Dalquist improved the design, making his pans of lightweight aluminum and modifying the dimensions to make them less awkward to wield. Named after the German word for a gathering of people, or “bund,” Dalquist added a “t” to the end to trademark the word, and Bundt cakes were born.
Bundt pans skyrocketed to fame in 1966 when the second-place winner of the popular Pillsbury Bake-Off completion baked an aptly named Tunnel of Fudge cake in a Bundt pan. Nordic Ware made 30,000 pans a day to keep up with the sudden demand. Today over 70 million households have a Bundt pan.
Recently a new neighbor moved into my neighborhood and and inspired me to pull out my mother’s original Bundt pan, still in its box from the late ’60s. I noticed the recipe on the back of the Nordic Ware box is the same recipe used by renowned chefs, including Ina Garten. Its simplicity and success have endured for over fifty years as much as the pans themselves. A basic formula of sugar, butter, eggs, flour, milk, and leavening agents yields a delicious vanilla cake, which can be modified with a variety of flavors to suit your taste. I experimented with lemon, coconut, and almond, even mixing and matching the flavors, such as almond cake with coconut drizzle or coconut cake infused with lemon.
Bundt cakes are classic: a comfort-food cake in a striking shape, topped a simple dusting of powdered sugar or drizzle of glaze. They are deceptively easy to make, and yet say, “I made a special effort for you”. And they sure do make folks feel warmly welcomed. Rather than Tunnel of Fudge cakes, they might more aptly be called “tunnel of love” cakes.
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WV Culinary Team: Gather 'Round, There is always time for cake - Charleston Gazette-Mail
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