Calling all bakers! I need your best, most reliable cakes made in bundt/tube pans. My nephew is getting married this summer and they asked me to make some bundt cakes, since this style of cake is a favorite of the bride. I plan to make @rstuart cream cheese poundcake, but don’t have any other set recipes. I would love your favorite citrus recipes, but the bride has also expressed interest in the follow flavors: red velvet, confetti, peanut butter and white chocolate. The cakes would need to freeze well, as I will have to make them in advance.
This group has some incredible bakers, so I deeply value your opinions!
Kentucky Butter Cake is a popular, well liked cake. mig is the expert Bundt baker and I value her opinion on bundts. I make Leite’s Bourbon variation but I think the plain version could be glazed with a white chocolate ganache and perhaps white chocolate chips or a chunked up bar.
Also, from Rustic Fruit Desserts, the lemon buttermilk ( rhubarb) Bundt cake is excellent. SK made a version with berries that is very good, but it could be used as a base cake and flavored as you wish.
I catered a wedding with bundt cakes, and the two recipes I used were:
Triple lemon velvet bundt (Rose Levy Berenbaum) - the best lemon bundt recipe I know, and I’ve baked probably 20-30 different lemon bundts. Scroll down to the second recipe in the article. You can freeze this cake after adding the syrup, but before the glaze.
All citrus bundts are improved with the use of high-quality citrus oil (not extract, which is cheaper and less strong.) If you’re making a quantity of lemon cakes for this event, I would recommend buying a small bottle of Boyajian Lemon Oil. Just 1/4 or 1/2 teaspoon added to cake batter makes an enormous and very positive difference. Feel free to message me if you have more questions about culinary oil.
The second recipe I used was a Cook’s Illustrated chocolate sour cream bundt. It is reprinted (no paywall) here. Can also be frozen.
Orange olive oil bundt. I didn’t want to mask the beautiful flavor so I didn’t glaze it, but you could. Lots of flavor options for the glaze that would go beautifully, including chocolate.
Here’s a photo from the actual wedding. I had included a big bag of white confectioners’ sugar glaze that could be added at the last minute if the bride/caterer so desired, but they decided just to go with fresh flower decors, which I ultimately did not disagree with.
I also adore the Kentucky Butter Cake and have made it more than any other cake. That said, I talked myself out of making it for the wedding in favor of cakes with recognizable “flavors,” and if you’re already making the cream cheese poundcake, I think you’ll want to avoid the KBC.
I also love the Rustic Fruit Desserts/Smitten Kitchen lemon buttermilk cake, and have made it with just rhubarb as well as with berries. I’ll caution that adding fruit dramatically increases the chances of your cake sticking/breaking/splitting/cracking when removing it from the pan. Even for an extremely experienced bundt obsessive like myself - I would not have volunteered to make a fruit-filled bundt for a wedding, out of fear of disaster striking. Also fruit-filled bundts can look a little… mottled.
Finally, I have a couple photos of VERY pretty fruit glazes that I love - one blood orange, one pomegranate - that I think make for striking presentation. Let me see if I can dig them up.
blood orange glaze - just confec sugar, fresh blood orange juice (strained), a pinch of salt, and a smidge of melted butter. for pomegranate, simply substitute bottled pom juice.
My most-baked cake in a bundt is this Orange Olive Oil Cake. I cut the sugar back significantly (1 to 1-1/4 cup instead of 1-3/4), rub the zest into the sugar, and add cointreau. (The recipe as revised – lower temp, less baking soda – does not sink.)
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However for your purposes, her Orange-Ricotta Pound Cake might be even better – it has a wonderful, rich crumb, and if I had ricotta in my fridge at all times I would make it more often. You can substitute cream cheese for the ricotta for an even finer, dense crumb. It is reminiscent of a creamsicle if you add some vanilla along with the orange.
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On the lemon front, we have two family favorites. This lemon buttermilk pound cake is on repeat. I now bake it as cupcakes for portioning, but it’s originally a bundt. (No fat-free anything – full fat buttermilk or greek yogurt thinned slightly)
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And this cream cheese pound cake has the fine, dense crumb I mentioned earlier. I always make it a lemon cake with the additions from the previous one.
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If you want something a bit different, this Gulab Jamun Cake is essentially a ricotta pound cake with Indian flavors – cardamom, saffron, rosewater.
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I also adapted this Yossi Arefi recipe for the same flavors (no berries) and baked it in a bundt, and it was wonderful.
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ETA: You mentioned grapefruit and white chocolate. There’s a grapefruit white chocolate cake in the first Yossi Arefi book that everyone else loved but was a big fail for me. The orange olive oil or ricotta cakes from Alexandra Cooks can be easily transformed to grapefruit.
i have the same bundt pan as pictured in your avatar. I only used it once, several years ago, when it stuck and scorched. I followed a typical bundt/tube pan recipe, and suspect that the corners of the fins were the problem. If I use the pan again, I am thinking.of dropping the temp by 25°F as soon as the pan is in the oven. Do you treat your various shapes of bundt pan differently?
I have a recipe for a white chocolate bundt cake and it has been a family favorite for decades. It’s dense like a pound cake and you can dress it up or down. It can also work as a 9" x13". If you want the recipe, I can attach it.
Mig, this is so helpful! Thank you so much! I bought the lemon oil and am going to be taking RLB’s cake for a test drive today.
And I showed your pictures to the bride, and she wants to do them as centerpieces now! She had been waffling about centerpieces, so that it was great to be able to nail that down.
I have 4 different pans so far - the original, the heritage, one that is wilton but kind of looks like the nordicware crown pan, and another random one. I’m still keeping an eye out for interesting ones that I can find at a decent price. I will report back tomorrow when they taste the cake and am so appreciative of you taking the time to respond so thoroughly!
I LOVE that olive oil cake. Do you think I would need to double it to do it in a regular sized bundt? And I’ve considered making that orange ricotta cake a number of times, so I’m thinking this is the kick in the pants I need to do it.
I was going to make rstuarts cream cheese poundcake without the cranberries (bride doesn’t like them), but then got worried that it would be off balance without them. Maybe I will try this one because she was very enthusiastic about the idea of a cc poundcake.
And I am going to try that galub jamun cake for myself! I love them and that’s such a fun idea.
The recipe says 9" cake pan or 12 cup bundt pan. (Since she added an extra egg, the batter volume is more plentiful than before.)
A trick I often use to compare my various oddly shaped pans is to fill water in one pan to measure volume for another (I’m usually going the other way – halving or quartering).
Of course, there are also handy conversion charts like this one too
The triple lemon velvet is DELICIOUS and made the cut for the wedding! It has such a lush texture and perfect balance of sweet and tart. I love Ina’s lemon cake, but this is definitely better. Thanks for the recommendation on the oil, too. Do you have any other recipes you love to use it in?
This weekend, I will try the chocolate sour cream bundt or a cream cheese poundcake. Stay tuned!
