Cake for school fete

tyllwyd

Sorry if this isn't quite the right place, but I thought the people here would be clued up about the cost of stuff ...

I'm going to make a cake for the school fete, and I was going to put my own price on it so that it doesn't get sold at a stupid price. I wouldn't like to think it might get sold for less than it cost to make! But I'm feeling a bit out of touch with the cost of things and I'd like to check what other people think.

I was going to make a lemon sponge in a 2lb loaf tin. So that's
2 eggs 40p
about 120g butter 50p
180g flour 10p
180g sugar 10p
a lemon 20p
a cake liner 10p

... which comes to £1.40 plus the cost of cooking it.

Does that look right? Do people think a selling price of £3 would be OK?

whatatwit

How many muffins would the mix make?
You would probably get a better return on those, maybe with some lemon icing on top.
Personally, I wouldn't pay £3 for a lemon sponge cake, but would pay 40p or so for a muffin, especially if it looked pretty.

tyllwyd

Yes, fairy cakes/muffins sell well, but they do get a lot of those donated. At 40p each, 12 cakes would be £4.80 so it probably would be more profitable, but if they were £30p or less it wouldn't be so much of a difference.

twink

hobnobs?

Hell_Dans_Un_Handcart

Hmm, for a plain lemon loaf, I'd go with £2. They start at just £1 in supermarkets.

I bake a lot for fetes/fayres and a pricier cake would have a chocolate topping etc.

To be fair, if you are donating the cake, whether it covers its costs doesn't really matter

Penelope_Penguin

Hell_Dans_Un_Handcart wrote: »

To be fair, if you are donating the cake, whether it covers its costs doesn't really matter

It does :eek: If the sale price of the cake doesn't even cover the cost of ingredients, you might as well bake a cake for yourself and give the money you would have spent to the school funds. I stopped baking for cake stalls when my beautiful all-butter HM cakes sold for the same as a commercial one from Tesco :mad: End of rant

Penny. x

sooz

At our school fair, it's mostly the kids who are buying cakes to eat there, the big cakes, jams & other food things to take home don't sell so well.

I only once helped out on the cake stall & it was hell :eek: .

Iced fairy cakes & muffins went very quickly, as did any nice shaped & iced biscuits. Stars & trees at christmas, & feet, hands, daleks, cows etc in the summer.

Particuarly popular with the boys last time were iced fairy cakes each with a large gummy sweet spider on the top.

tyllwyd

Hell_Dans_Un_Handcart wrote: »

Hmm, for a plain lemon loaf, I'd go with £2. They start at just £1 in supermarkets.

I bake a lot for fetes/fayres and a pricier cake would have a chocolate topping etc.

To be fair, if you are donating the cake, whether it covers its costs doesn't really matter

I agree that £3 seems a lot - but I can't help thinking that £2 is what they would have charged last year, and the cost of the ingredients has gone through the roof since then.

I'm with one of other posters - I've got no problem donating to the PTA, but I can't see the point in bothering to make a cake if I could have just given them the money and saved myself the bother! I made rice crispie cakes one year, but they sold for less than the cost of the chocolate.

It tends to be very manic at the cake stall with kids filling up bags of fairy cakes. Last time I went, the larger cakes did sell OK because there weren't so many of them and some people came specially to look for them, but yes, I think they were probably iced. I know you can get a cake in Tescos for £1, but if you went to a stall in your local market to buy a homemade one, you'd surely expect to pay a bit more than that?

sillyvixen

i used to make rich fruit cakes for church fete stalls - they were always sold for less than i made them for (contained a lot of fruit) now i victoria sandwiches and chocalate cakes as they seem to go for the same price as the fruit cake and cost less to make.. occasionally i make a bannana cake if i have left over bannanas costs me no more than a regular sponge cake and uses up the leftover bannanas!!

freyasmum

I make that out to be 98.5p per loaf, using value ingredients.

When I sell cakes, I take the cost of ingredients and treble - that then gives me my selling price. I think individual cakes/slices sell better - you can also charge a bit more if you ice it and make it look pretty.

I think your best bet is to make a round cake, cut into generous slices, spread with lemon curd and iced with lemon flavoured icing, with (if there's any left) grated zest over the top.

I made carrot cake today and sold it for 75p a slice - that'd be £6.00 for your cake

tyllwyd

Thanks everyone!

Unfortunately I am the least confident cook ever (not the worst cook, just total lack of confidence in what I've made!) and I've never managed to get my icing to go right, so I just went with the sponges in the end, and put £2 on them - which to be honest looks very low to me, but I was so stressed after I'd made them I couldn't cope with anything more!