Ring pans are a nice change from a standard round cake. Chocolate cake, fruit cakes, madeira with bits of cherry or other fruit in then sprinkled with icing sugar or with choclate icing drizzled over.

Again you can get these in metal, or in silicone, or as bases for a spring form pan.

Also fantastic for jelly and blancmange, but make sure you clean it well as a well used metal tin can lend a slightly odd taste to the jelly.

Since this is a shaped tin you can't line them but have to stick to greasing or greasing and flouring. It's also very, very important to wait for the cake to cool down before turning it out.

Slicing and layering ring cakes is really, really tricky in my experience - the cake always breaks. A technique that can help though is to cut little rings of greaseproof and use them to physically separate the cake mix at stages.

Last idea - beautiful to look at, but hard to serve, fill the hole in the middle with fruit or cream and fruit mixed. If jelly is your thing then you could pour some jelly down there too - make sure the bottom of the hole is sealed to the plate with icing or chocolate or you'll get a terrible shock as the jelly gushes out from under the cake!