Cake: Bundt Cake

Originally, bundt was a trademark for a fluted-and-scalloped tube pan. Today it is a generic term for any cake made with bundt-style bakeware. The bundt pan was created by H. David Dalquist in Minneapolis in 1950, according to Nordic Ware, a division of Northland Aluminum Products, which Dalquist founded. A group of Jewish women from the local Hadassah asked if he could make a more practical “bund pan” for their Bundkuchen than the fragile ceramic or heavy, cast-iron versions from Europe. The chemical engineer, whose fledging company made Scandinavian cookware and pastry molds, agreed to try. He developed a light, sturdy cast-aluminum model of the pan that improved upon its centuries-old design. Dalquist added a “t” to the word Bund (German for “gathering”) and trademarked it in 1951. The bundt pan skyrocketed to fame in 1966 after Texan Ella Helfrich used it to create her Tunnel of Fudge cake, which won second prize in that year’s Pillsbury Bake-Off. Sales of the pan soared, helped in part by a 1970 decision to license the Bundt trademark to Pillsbury for use with a line of cake mixes. In 1985, federal courts declared the term generic. By the time of Dalquist’s death in 2005, Nordic Ware had sold nearly 50 million bundt pans in addition to 10 million of variations on the original.