WE SELL AN OBSCENE NUMBER OF THESE PANS:

In 1946, H. David Dalquist arrived home from the war. Home for him was Minneapolis, Minnesota, where with his family he launched a plastic company. (He was a chemical engineer by trade.) A few years later, the family bought another company, one that sold metalware for the kitchen under the name of Nordic Ware. The name should offer a clue as to what they produced: kitchen goods for the largely Scandinavian immigrant community around them. The Dalquists liked the sound of Nordic Ware, and adopted the name for their whole enterprise.

Simultaneously, Rose Joshua, Fannie Shanfield, and Mary Abrahamson approached Dalquist with a plea. These women, members of a local Jewish volunteer group, needed him to make a very special pan. In Germany, bready cakes called kugelhopf or bundkuchen are still specialties today. Joshua was on the hunt for a modern pan that she could bake her mother's recipe in, and the original pans could weigh up to 15 pounds.

Dalquist molded Joshua a pan out of aluminum, one very similar to the kugelhopf pans still used in Europe today. But Dalquist's design was odd enough for the U.S. that, decades later, one of his daughters remembers a plant manager telling her father, "If you can sell that thing, you can sell anything."

Dalquist, riffing off the word "bund," added a "t" to the name. (He was eager to avoid any association with the German American Bund, a prominent Nazi group established in the USA in 1936.) Then, he quietly added it to his inventory. Few people bought the pan. At least, until 1966.

Devout Catholic and Texas resident Ella Herlfrich had somehow gotten her hands on a Bundt. True, the original group of women who asked Dalquist to make them did sell small numbers of Bundt pans to family and friends, but that was for a fundraiser to support the building of schools and hospitals in Israel.

Nevertheless, Herlfrich entered her nut-studded chocolate Tunnel of Fudge cake into 1966's Pillsbury Bake-Off contest. The secret ingredient in that cake was a packet of Pillsbury's Double Dutch Fudge Buttercream Frosting Mix, which when added to the batter created a ring of creamy fudge suspended magically in the center of the cake. Her secret weapon, though, was her Bundt pan. The judges were impressed enough to award Helfrich second prize. (It consisted of $5,000 dollars and a tractor.)

While the first-prize entry faded from history, the Tunnel of Fudge made a huge splash. Food scientist Shirley O. Corriher went as far as to call the Tunnel of Fudge cake "THE chocolate cake of the 1960s."

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