Nordic Ware Bundt Pan

The Bundt pan is a heavy ring of cast aluminium with a tall central tube and broad, rounded flutes, and the cake that comes out of it needs no decoration. The flutes are the decoration, and the tube lets a dense batter bake through to the middle. Turned out onto a plate, the cake carries the shape of the pan in sharp relief, which is why a Bundt cake is recognisable from across a room.

The shape is old. The Gugelhupf moulds of central Europe were traditionally cast iron. In the late 1940s two members of the Minneapolis chapter of Hadassah, Rose Joshua and Fannie Schanfield, asked a local manufacturer whether he could make one in something lighter. H. David Dalquist had started Nordic Ware in his basement after the war, making Scandinavian baking irons for Minnesota kitchens, and he knew aluminium casting. He and his partner Don Nygren drew one up, and in 1950 the company made a small run, naming it the Bundt pan and adding the 't' so that the name could be trademarked.

For years it sold poorly, and the company thought about dropping it. Then in 1966 Ella Helfrich, a Houston baker, came second at the Pillsbury Bake-Off with a chocolate cake baked in one, the Tunnel of Fudge. Pillsbury received more than 200,000 letters, many asking where to get the pan, and the Bundt went on to overtake the Jell-O mould as the best-selling pan in America: in the company's own phrase, an overnight success sixteen years in the making.

Nordic Ware still casts the original shape at its plant in St. Louis Park, on the edge of Minneapolis, and sells it as the Anniversary Bundt Pan. It counts its Bundt sales in tens of millions, and the Smithsonian keeps original aluminium Bundt pans from the company in its collection.