Gugelhupf

A number of rather interesting stories credit people from Austria to France with the invention of this yeasted coffee cake. One theory says it was first made in Vienna in the seventeenth century and was modeled after the turban headdress of a sultan to celebrate Austria’s defeat of the Turkish invaders. The cake is also closely associated with the French Alsace region. There it is called Kugelhopf, from two German words: kugel, meaning “ball” and hopf, which translates