Getting ready for National Bundt Day Nov 15

Sheesh! I'm seriously envious. And I can't decide between the Chusanthemum and the Bavaria.

Bavaria. It looks more traditional.

Pretty soon the States will have a "National XXX Day" every day of the year!

Looking to see what a bundt pan is, I see it looks rather like a kugelhopf pan. Is there no traditional bundt recipe?

The traditional bundt recipe is "Tunnel of Fudge" cake, which was a Pillsbury bake-off winner years ago, and used a frosting mix that's no longer made. Cook's Country experimented to create a similar recipe in 2008 that once again was broadly published, including by this newspaper

I remember reading somewhere that the bundt cake, despite its Germanic-sounding name, is a 20th century American invention, as is the pan in which it is baked. If the winning recipe in a Pillsbury Bake-Off is the "traditional" bundt cake recipe, I'm inclined to think that what I read was true.

To bjd: I think that we may already honor something on virtually every day of the year, so your comment on "National XXX Day" is right on the mark.

I also like the Bavaria. It's traditional looking with a bit of a twist. Are you going to do a traditional drizzling of glaze? I hate the traditional glaze, too sugary for me. A nice light layer of ginger frosting would be cool.

According to the Smithsonian (which has a large Nordic Wre collection)
>Records of a family-owned manufacturing firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, best known for kitchenware products, including the Bundt Pan and Micro-Go-Round. In 1946, the year he returned from Navy service in the Pacific, H. David (Dave) Dalquist (1918-2005) joined his brother Mark to launch a new manufacturing firm, Plastics for Industry. In 1950, the brothers bought Northland Aluminum Products, a small firm with a line of "Nordic Ware" products including griddles and steak platters.
>The same year, Dave Dalquist created a cast aluminum, fluted cake pan at the request of two local women, members of the Hadassah organization. Northland Aluminum registered the trademark "Bundt" for the new product and began to sell it to local department stores. During the 1960s, Nordic Ware grew slowly, gradually increasing its product line to include specialty baking and cookware items and stove-top cookware. The company also expanded its production capacity and built its sales and marketing capabilities, including a national network of sales representatives working on commission. Dorothy Dalquist, Dave’s wife, played a vital role in the company’s growth.
>Although the Bundt Pan was only one of many Nordic Ware products, it became a national celebrity in 1966 when a Texas woman used it for her prize-winning Tunnel of Fudge Cake in the immensely popular Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest. In response to the spread of microwave technology in the 1970s, Nordic Ware developed many new products including the very successful Micro-Go-Round. David Dalquist , son of Dave Dalquist, succeeded his father as head of the firm in the 1980s.

Other sources say that the Hadassah ladies wanted an aluminum version of " an old-world, heavy, heavy ceramic pan with a hole in the middle, called a Kugelhopf.". Food Timeline adds
>The earliest recips [sic] we find for "Bunt" or "Bund" cake in America were published in Jewish-American cookbooks long before Mr. Dalquist's first bundt pan hit the market. It is probably no coincidence these recipe [sic] appear with ones for kugelhopf.

"Bundt" is still a trademark.

I can't figure out how I came to have two Bundt pans, but there they are.

They're both the shape of a Bundt pan. I didn't know until now that there were other shapes.

Until reading this thread and looking at the links, I thought that there was only one shape for a bundt pan: this one.

I just did an "images" search on Google, though, and found dozens of different shapes, some of them weird, others just ugly. Tradition! That's my watchword.