to ask how much you would pay for homemade Christmas cake

I wouldn't buy a cake from a car boot sale.

No offence but I don't know if you have cats you let on your counters etc.

OP I am sure your cakes are yummy but I think especially Christmas cakes are very hard to make a profit on, as others say. The basic ingredients are so £££ compared to, say, cupcakes. Dried fruit, brandy, butter, nuts, icing and marzipan… mounts up. Plus they need cooking for ages.

I agree that the way might be to offer very small ones that can be given as gifts or would suit one person (often even in a family only one person likes it) which could be beautifully decorated with fondant icing – but even then I would only make them to order. Car boot is a nightmare. You probs need to do a hygiene cert as a minimum. I honestly cannot see you making any money from this. You could give the cakes as gifts tho.

Nothing, sorry.

You would need to charge a considerable amount to make any kind of profit. You would also need to register with Environmental Health and get all your food hygiene certification before you could sell.

Could you make little individual ones they’d probably be easier to sell ? Might look nice with just one little decoration on

We made a wedding cake (as a gift) for a friend once, other guests who we vaguely knew asked if we could make theirs. When we said no, they offered to pay £200. The ingredients alone were £150, without the time & stress on top.

I doubt you could sell at a price that would be worth the time & hassle (and risk of being left with a lot of Xmas cake).

How big are those cakes? I'd say from looking at the photo I'd pay up to £30 as homemade cakes aren't cheap to make, you've got to factor in time, ingredients, fuel, decorations etc.
I love a car boot sale but if you're looking at selling cakes at them I don't think homemade cakes will get the prices they deserve at them, you'll get people wanting them for a fiver or less!
Not really the audience for them.

My DD at age 17 did a Leiths cookery cert at school. Her Christmas cake won the prize and, sorry, but it was way better than the photos here. Other DDs did beautiful decoration too. The cake pictured is very basic! It’s not very special and mine and DDs are far superior!

You would be better selling individual slices of the cake because no one can see what it looks like inside.

Try selling without icing, cheaper and more attractive

The cost for ingredients for my Christmas cake easily is north of £30. That’s for really lovely fruit/brandy/butter/icing.

I’d be reluctant to buy from someone who wasn’t established as you can’t guarantee the quality of the ingredients or the bake. Your cakes look like a lot of love has gone into them but to make a decent profit I doubt that a car boot is the right place.

People want something for nothing at car boot sales. Sorry but this does not sound like a good money spinning idea.

I did a few boot sales some time ago and found people didn’t want to spend money and would haggle over 20 pence. I think you would do better if you got a stand at a local Christmas market.

My other thought was the recipe I used to use was the best fruit cake I ever had but worked out quite expensive. Much more than a shop bought cake. If that’s the same for your recipe you might need to have samples on your stall so people could judge if it’s worth their money.

Even if you don’t add anything to the cost for your time, you will need to factor in the price of your pitch, samples, petrol, parking, packaging.

I think that would all work out to be an expensive cake when other Christmas purchases are more important to people especially right now when most people are cutting back.

To actually answer your question I would only spend £10

Christmas cakes take a lot of effort to make and good ingredients are expensive. I don't think you would make a profit on them, as supermarkets have decent ones that they can mass produce cheaply. I am sure your cake is much, much nicer, and nothing beats homemade, but lots of people don't particularly like Christmas cake, so often they buy them just for show, or just for the sake of it. You would probably make more profit on a cheap log style cake that looks lovely but is inexpensive to produce. Personally i would not buy a cake at a car boot sale, no matter how good it looked/tasted. Sorry.

So do I, especially when eaten with a wedge of cheddar cheese😋

As a few others have said for a cake that big you’d have to charge quite a lot to break even. I make mine in a square tin and then cut into 4 and ice separately. I pay £10 for one a quarter of the size of yours from a local cake shop (when I’m wanting cake and too impatient to wait all the weeks for mine to be ready!). I wouldn’t buy from a car boot but I can’t put my finger on why.

Have you looked into a cake cupboard? There’s one at the end of my road that is filled weekly with sliced cake and makes a lot but depends on footfall in your area.

I think it's very hard to go down this route. Personally I would never by a cake from someone I don't know because I have no guarantee of their hygienic standards. Also, I think you need a permit to do this for exactly this reason. Why don't you give them as christmas gifts to family/friends ?

Sign up for a 1 day food hygiene course and display your certificate.
I would make 4 or 6 inch cakes and not ice them. Your decorating skills would not help them to sell.
Wrap them well in cling film.
Put a list of ingredients underneath.
You would get £8 for a small plain fruit cake if it contaimed brandy and cherries.

@Whataninterestinglookingpotato sorry I didn't mean to add my comment to your post 😩

I reckon the photos don't do the cake justice. It looks traditional and lovely. I wouldn't choose to sell them at a car boot though, it doesn't seem like the right place to sell food items. Makes me feel a bit ick at the thought. Instead maybe create a Facebook page now and make the cakes to order in time for Christmas?

@TheHopefulBaker - another point is venues...

At car boot sales people are in a bargain mindset. They want a lot for very little. Local Christmas fairs or craft fairs are more likely to have people prepared to spend. However, if there's a bring and buy cake stand, that will undercut your prices by a lot, so thinking about where to sell is very important.

Don't do it. Fruitcakes are exceedingly expensive to make, and if marzipanned and iced properly take such a large amount of time that it is impossible to make a living unless you have an existing customer base.

I did it for 7 years. It involved a large outlay and pre-sales so there was never an unsold cake being baked. It also relied on an existing customer base from other things I'd baked - so they were prepared to pay artisan prices and not M&S prices.

Even then, 10 years ago befoe the fuel and COL crisis my 'hourly rate', if I worked it out, was absolutely tiny. Everyone also only wants theirs in the week before Christmas so you have to be able to hygeinically stopre all those you've sold (around 40 in my case).

There are a lot bettter options for making money that cakes with extremely high ingredient costs. Novelty Cristmas baked goods are cheaper, faster and have higher profit margins.

I'd recommend making small ones wrapped in cellophane and tied with a ribbon and sell them at Christmas fayres. People would buy these for presents etc and for themselves. I'm not sure a boot sale would be the right market for them?

Also, there are added complications with food hygiene, as if you're selling to the public you'd need to register with your council, do a L2 food safety course yourself and provide info on allergens on everything you sell.

Sounds a bit hideous and not simple to do! But it can be done and may be worth some thought if you'd like to take it seriously. Failing that, ask around to friends to see if they'd like you to make one for them. Make sure you cost your ingredients and electric costs properly - then decide on a price to sell.

I honestly don’t think there’s a market for it unless you’re selling to people you know.

I’d say about a tenner as you can get one in any supermarket for that. The only money in cakes are the super professional ones that can’t be easily replicated at home.

Well, as a starting point, work out how much all the ingredients and decorations etc cost, and go from there.

But... to be brutally honest (and I know it's a fuzzy picture) but those cakes look pretty poorly presented. They may taste amazing, but if you want to sell them they need to look way better than that and people are not going to spend that sort of money (I would expect at least £50+ for it to be worth your while) at a car boot sale on a cake.

Ultimately though, even with top-notch presentation you are not going to make much of a profit, if any. People always undervalue things like this. My mum used to make absolutely stunning christmas cakes, both to look at and to taste. Each cake probably had about £50 worth of ingredients in them and hours and hours of time spent on them, and she absolulely would not have been able to sell them even just to break even.

Have you sat down and figured out what the cost would be to you for the ingredients? For a high quality cake I imagine it's not insubstantial and you would therefore have to charge a decent amount to make it worth your while. if I was going to purchase a Christmas cake, personally I would buy a professionally made one. There's no way I would buy one from a car boot sale.