The made-in-Minnesota Bundt pan and the Star Tribune's Taste section have enjoyed a long, fruitful relationship.
The earliest Bundt recipe to appear in Taste was published on Nov. 24, 1969, nine weeks after the section's debut. It was part of an interview with Elsa Rosborough, a representative from Butter-Nut Coffee (fun fact: "Midwesterners who brag about their strong, black coffee might be surprised to learn that coffee companies ship their weakest blends to this part of the country," reads the story). The article included recipes for upside-down coffee cakes; one of them, "Sour Cream Somersault," called for chopped pecans, a box of yellow cake mix, cinnamon, sour cream and a Bundt pan.
In the intervening years, dozens and dozens _ and dozens _ of Bundt cake recipes followed: "Mrs. Lyndon Johnson's Famous Lemon Pound Cake." "Date Beer Cake." "Painted Peach Cake."
Very few of them embraced chocolate. At least until Valentine's Day in 1988, when Taste published a revised version of the Tunnel of Fudge cake.
At the time, this baking juggernaut was probably the country's most famous cake. It also boasted deep local roots. The recipe came out of the 1966 Pillsbury Bake-Off, back when American culinary trends were shaped by the Minneapolis-based company's closely scrutinized cooking contests.
Contestant Ella Helfrich of Houston found baking inspiration from three sources: the pecan tree in her backyard, a box of Pillsbury's Two Layer Double-Dutch Fudge Buttercream Frosting mix and what was then a kitchenware novelty, a fluted and scalloped aluminum tube pan produced by Nordic Ware in St. Louis Park.
Curiously, Helfrich's cake took second place that year; the winner was Golden Gate Snack Bread, which requires processed cheese spread and dry onion soup mix and hasn't exactly endured as the decades have passed. Meanwhile, Helfrich pocketed $5,000 (that's roughly $39,000 in 2019 dollars) and lasting fame because her recipe went viral, a pre-internet sensation that also kicked off a blazing demand for what was then the relatively obscure Bundt pan.
(Nordic Ware founder H. David Dalquist started manufacturing the pans in 1950, based on a request from a member of the Minneapolis chapter of Hadassah, who wanted to replicate the deep, heavy cakes pans of her native Germany. By the way, bund is German for association, and Dalquist added the "t").
Today, Nordic Ware says that 70 million households worldwide are equipped with a Bundt pan.
Helfrich's brownielike cake _ which has a gooey chocolately filling, hence the name _ encountered a wrinkle in the late 1980s when Pillsbury quit manufacturing boxed frosting mixes as consumers became more interested in ready-to-spread canned frostings. As a result, the company's kitchens developed a cake from scratch. (Find it at startribune.com/taste.)
CONVENIENCE FIRST
Here's how mainstream the Bundt pan became, post-Tunnel of Fudge Cake: Pillsbury produced its own line of Bundt cake mixes, and they were as popular as Nordic Ware's harvest gold and avocado green color palette, which gave way to Reagan-era almond and poppy.
Many of the Taste archive's Bundt cake recipes _ especially those dating from the 1970s and 1980s _ are a reflection of an era when timesaving convenience products were all the rage.
Witness the May 1973 headline, "Where pudding, cake meet," a how-to on finding Bundt cake nirvana by pairing white cake mix with instant pistachio pudding mix and creme de menthe. Other dubious formulas include a marriage of yellow cake mix, coconut-pecan frosting mix and sour cream (a 1974 classic), and a 1976 blend of cherry-chip cake mix, instant coconut pudding mix and maraschino cherries. The list goes on and on.
Some recipes could be filed under "O," for "Oddities." Consider "Orange Coffeecake," which requires a cup of coarsely crushed cornflakes. Or the prune Bundt. Or a mincemeat version, glazed with a jar of butterscotch sauce.
Or a 1972 entry, supplied by a long-gone Bloomington, Minn., restaurant, that fortifies a yellow cake mix with a sauce of canned pears _ pureed in a blender _ and ends with a flourish of rum-laced Cool Whip.
Instead _ because everything comes back in fashion, right? _ look to its made-from-scratch counterpart, published in Taste in 2008, where bakers are asked to produce a pear sauce that's folded into a spice cake batter. Dense, buttery and redolent of cardamom, ginger and nutmeg _ and topped with a tangy cream cheese glaze _ the final product looks and tastes like the Bundt pan should have been invented for it.
We're baking it to celebrate Taste's 50th birthday, but it's the kind of winning recipe that doesn't require a special occasion.
