How to Bake the Perfect Bundt Cake

Jennifer Dalquist: Hi! I am Jenny Dalquist. I work for Nordic Ware, makers of the original Bundt pan, and I'm going to be teaching you how to make the perfect Bundt cake today. It's actually very simple. You need a few simple ingredients that you probably already have in your kitchen at home and we're going to talk about how to grease the pan properly so you make sure your cake comes out each time, how to mix your batter so that you get the right consistency, how to make sure that the cake is finished and then how to decorate it very simply with just a dusting of sugar. Ingredients we're going to be working with today are 3 cups of all-purpose flour, 2 sticks of butter, 5 eggs, 3 quarters of a cup of butter milk, 2 and 1 quarter cups of light brown sugar, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, one 1/2 teaspoon of salt and one 1/2 cup of powdered sugar for dusting. The tools and equipments we're going to be using today in the kitchen are a stand mixer, but you can also use a hand mixer or just mix by hand in a bowl with a spatula, a silicon spatula, a pastry brush, a Bundt pan, a cake tester or a wooden skewer and a strainer to use for sifting. Most of you probably already own a Bundt pan in your kitchen, but if you don't, when you go to the store, you're going to find that there are a lot of different of materials and shapes that Bundt pans can come in. But Nordic Ware only makes those out of aluminum. We make them out of aluminum because aluminum is the best heat conducting material when you're baking.

The reasons that aluminum makes a difference is, you're going to see your cake's rise higher in them and you're going to see them evenly cooked inside and out. You're not going to have any darker spots or lighter spots. A formed Bundt pan is going to have a little bit less definition on the cake. On the inside, you can see that the ridges are slightly more rounded and with a cast pan, we're able to get very sharp creases inside of the pan. Now regardless of which kind of pan you have at home, after we run through how to bake the perfect Bundt today, your cakes are going to turn out wonderfully. The only kitchen safety measures you are going to need to remember today are just general oven safety and safety when you're using your mixer. Before we start baking today, I wanted to give you a little bit of background on the Bundt pan. A fluted tube pan, which's the generic name for a Bundt pan, is a design that's been around for hundreds of years. It originated in Europe and the design was the hole in the center of it, allows a really thick and dense batter from a cake to cook evenly so that you don't have a raw middle and crooked sides on it. Although this design is hundreds of years old, what we know today as the Bundt pan was actually designed and trademarked by my grandmother and grandfather who founded Nordic Ware over 60 years ago. You may or may not know this but a Bundt pan can't be called a Bundt pan unless it was made by Nordic Ware here in the United States. So now that we know a little bit of history about this, let's get start it baking.