This cake pan has haunted me for a decade

When I was in college, I backpacked through Central Europe with a few friends. And I mean literally backpacked — all I had was a battered North Face bag in which I’d stuffed my clothes, a toothbrush, and a spare pair of shoes.

Traveling light ultimately led to tragedy when I stumbled across a gorgeous vintage copper gugelhupf pan at a flea market in Vienna. Even though it had been in my life for all of five minutes, I clung to it like a precious heirloom. “Just buy it,” my friend suggested. “But I don’t have room,” I sighed, and placed it back on the table.

Even over a decade later, I still wish I’d just carted that beautiful cake pan around in my arms for the rest of the trip rather than leave it behind.

Such is the magic of ringed cake pans like that one, or its American descendent, the Bundt pan. You could just make a regular cake. But where’s the fun in that? These pans and their many swirls, shapes, and spirals have a certain whimsy, all while still being rooted deeply in tradition. To me, a Bundt cake always evokes the weekly post-church coffee hours I attended growing up in the South, but its roots stretch across regions and even oceans. The tradition of ring-shaped cakes dates back to that same European gugelhupf, a yeasted, brioche-like cake that is particularly popular in Austria. In Germany, the cake is called bundkuchen. (The name combines the German words “bund,” which can mean bunch, and “kachen,” which means cake. Sound familiar?) The modern American Bundt came about in the late 1940s when two Jewish American bakers in Minneapolis asked the Minnesota cookware brand Nordic Ware to make a modern version of the iconic gugelhupf pan. The Bundt pan was born; in order to trademark their creation, the inventors added a “t” to “bund,” leading to the now-universal “Bundt cake” and, by extension, this iconic movie scene:

(It only took me two Substack sends to shoehorn in a My Big Fat Greek Wedding reference, which must be some kind of record, even for someone with the last name “Anastopoulo.”)

We’re currently celebrating the Bundt with a very special berry version: this Glazed Berry Bundt Cake, which highlights the stunning cake design with a colorful glaze that flows in charming drips down the sides. That recipe is based on our beloved Glazed Lemon Bundt Cake, one of the very first Recipes of the Year ever at King Arthur (dating all the way back to 2017!). The enduring popularity of that recipe — and the Bundt cake itself, over 75 years after the original Bundt pan made its debut — proves these cakes continue to capture our imagination in their many forms and flavors.

• During what we’ve dubbed the “Summer of Pizza,” consider hosting a pizza party for Slice Out Hunger. Their Summer Slice-A-Thon encourages home bakers to host pizza parties, with proceeds raised going to Slice Out Hunger’s Pie it Forward program, which combats food insecurity by delivering pizzas to those in need.

• Speaking of pizza ... David Tamarkin was on Maggie Hoffman’s podcast The Dinner Plan to chat all about it!

• I love passionfruit but I’m trying to wrap my head around passionfruit + chocolate as a flavor combo. Seems worth a shot?!

• I was in Paris earlier this month (yes, during the heat wave) and lost my mind over the ethereal brioche at Mamiche. If you’re in Paris anytime soon, make sure you visit!

Until next time,

Rossi