Photo: Arina P Habich (Shutterstock)
Bundt cake pans have many uses beyond baking cakes, from using it as a roasting pan to serving as a vessel for baked bread or lasagna. But even after a Bundt pan has outworn these traditional and semi-traditional uses, an old one can still be repurposed—say, as the Byrd Nest Studio blog suggests, as a flower pot that can serve as a centerpiece for a patio table, wrapping around the hole in the middle where you stick the umbrella.
Turning your old Bundt pan into a flower planter requires drilling holes in the bottom, to allow for drainage, and filling it with potting soil. Given the combination of power tools and dirt, I figured this would be the perfect activity to do with my four-year-old, whose love of mess is eclipsed only by his interest in power tools.
To make the planter, we got out the drill and drilled eight small holes in the bottom of the Bundt ban, spacing them evenly. Doing this is simple enough in theory, provided if you don’t have to factor in the enthusiastic “help” of a toddler, but given the ridges in a Bundt pan, drainage may be an issue, so make sure you’ve added enough holes to prevent water from collecting. (I put one small hole in each ridge.)
If you want to use your cake pan as a patio table planter, you may need to use your drill to widen the center hole as well, so that it is large enough to fit around the umbrella pole, then sanding the edges down. (I ended up leaving mine as it was.) Once we’d drilled enough holes, we filled the Bundt pan with potting soil and planted some flowers purchased from the plant store. My standard 12-cup capacity Bundt pan was large enough to fit two separate flower plants.
As you can imagine, the combination of power tools and dirt was a big hit with my kid, and the end result was a pretty awesome flower pot.
