No ifs, ands or bundts about it

When Nordic Ware of Minneapolis celebrates its 60th birthday this year, the lighted candles will probably be on a Bundt cake. After all, this fluted pan with the hole in the middle — you could call it the Spaghetti-O of the baking-pan world — is the bake-ware company's claim to fame.

But the once-obscure pan might have remained that way if not for the Tunnel of Fudge Cake, which Ella Rita Helfrich created for the 1966 Pillsbury Bake-Off. Baked in a Bundt pan, the cake's middle was a molten ring of fudgy sauce. The popular recipe swept the nation.

"The cake made a diminutive Houston mother of five a celebrity, changed the fortunes of a small company in Minneapolis, and made a little-known European pan a mainstay of nearly every American kitchen," wrote Amy Sutherland in "Cook-Off: Recipe Fever in America."

In fact, most households have a harvest-gold or avocado-green Bundt pan from that era still tucked away in a cupboard.

Today, you can buy Bundt pans shaped as sand castles, roses or carousels. Although the name Bundt is a Nordic Ware trademark, there are knock-offs made of silicone and stoneware.

To celebrate its 60th birthday — and maybe to find the next Tunnel of Fudge — Nordic Ware is sponsoring a Bundts Across America recipe contest. Recipes will be judged on originality, taste, texture, visual appearance and how well they represent the baker's home state.

"This contest is a celebration of the bakers that continue to reinvent the Bundt cake with their creative flair," said David Dalquist, Nordic Ware's president.

His father, also David Dahlquist, founded the Northland Aluminum Co. in Minneapolis in 1946. The company mainly made Scandinavian bake ware such as rosette and krumkake irons and ebleskiver pans. A Jewish women's group came to Dahlquist with an old-world cake pan from Europe. The metal tube in the middle conducted heat to evenly cook dense batter and dough.

"They asked my father if he could come up with a pan like this, because they wanted to have it for their bake sales and other events," Dahlquist said in a telephone interview from his office in Minneapolis. "They called it a 'boondt' pan, which, in German, has something to do with celebrations and crowds of people. The English spelling was 'bund,' so my father added a 't' on the end so the pronunciation would sound right."

He also applied for a trademark on the name. For about 10 years, the pan remained obscure. "There were several times when it almost got discontinued," said Dahlquist.