A bundt cake

A bundt cake is a dessert cake that is baked in a bundt pan, shaping it into a distinctive ridged ring. The d in "bundt" is assimilated into the t. The term is used chiefly in North America.
It would appear that "bundt" is derived from the German Bundkuchen (in Southern Germany and Austria called Gugelhupf, in Switzerland Gugelhopf), a ring-shaped tea-time cake. The word bundt appears as early as 1901 in The Settlement Cookbook, written by Lizzie Kander of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Bundt is used instead of bund in a recipe for "Bundt Kuchen." The aluminium bundt pan is a variation of ceramic cake forms that were used in Germany, Austria, and Hungary to make the ring-shaped cakes and was trademarked in 1950 by H. David Dalquist, founder of Nordic Ware, based in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, who developed it at the request of members of the Hadassah Society's chapter in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The old-world pans, with fluted and grooved sides, made of delicate ceramic or cast iron, were heavy and therefore difficult to use. He modified some existing Scandinavian pan designs and fashioned the pan out of aluminium.

Bundt pans

The pan sold somewhat slowly until a Pillsbury-sponsored baking contest in 1966 saw a bundt cake win second place. This prompted a scramble for the pans, causing them to surpass the tin Jell-O mold to become the most-sold pan in the United States. Since introduction, more than 50 million bundt pans have been sold by the Nordic Ware company.
The women of the Hadassah Society called them "bund pans". The German word bund in bundkuchen originated either from bundling or wrapping the cake's dough around the pan's centre holeor because a bund is a gathering of people. (In both German words, the final d is pronounced like a t.) Dalquist trademarked the word bundt, and Pillsbury licensed the name in 1970 for a line of cake mixes.
In early 2007, some of the original bundt pans were taken into the Smithsonian Institution's collection.
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