What weight should a slice of cake be?

[Secretseverywhere]

I was ordering online from Tesco and they seem to have gotten rid of weights for a lot of cakes in favour of serves x.

I was only looking at a lemon loaf cake which apparently serves 5 but if you go to description at the very end recommended portion size is 39g per person so the whole thing is 195g.

I assume this is shrinkflation and they are hoping people don’t notice what was a decent size cake 5 years ago has quietly shrunk away. Either that or I’m very greedy. I bought lemons in the end and made my own but I think the slices are more like 80-100g.

So my very boring question is how heavy do you think a slice of cake should be?

The size of a house brick.

If we're going back to the good old days of decent cake, at least a couple of ounces.

I’d say the weight of your first born child. Anything less is a piss take

Yeah but the serving sizes are shrunk down so that they can say things have fewer calories without having to make them have fewer calories

I do get that but it’s the (slightly odd) hiding of information and making me do maths to work out how big it is. When I buy sweets/ cheese/ beef I get the bag size in grams and the price per kilo for easy comparison. It’s only cake that I’ve come across that a subjective serves x rather than an objective weight.

I saw a personal pizza in America once, 8 servings 🫣 trying to pass it off as a serving being one slice

I bought a brownie from a local cake shed, thought it was pretty big so weighed it. 272g!

I feel like anything over a quarter kilo is not a slice! Brownies sre pretty dense so even when they look small are still filling. You could divide that into three and share or hsve a delicious treat with breakfast, lunch and dinner 😉

A large patio slab….failing that if a cake says “ serves 16” ….realistically in my house it will serve 6 or 7….x

You really do have to be on your guard against consuming too big a portion.

As a basic sensible rule, I defer to to the wisdom of the expert nutrition-based philosopher Piggy, who sagely cautions us to '"Never eat more than you can lift".

Recommended portion sizes have been tiny for years well before shrinkflation.

Part of it is calories per portion, they want to be able to say only 100/150/etc cals per portion but that is based on a tiny amount.

But look at things like cereal and ready meals. If you weigh a 'portion' of cereal it barely covers the bottom of the bowl and most people eat 2 or 3 times that.

For ready meals, I remember a comedian (or it could have been the Mary Whitehouse Experience) doing a routine in the 1990s 'serves 2? serves 2 what?' implying that a 2 portion ready meal was tiny and really made for 1.

But no doubt, the 'we've lost sight of portion sizes and you are a big fatty' Mumsnetters will be along soon to tell you that, if they ever ate something as disgustingly calorific as nasty Tesco UPF 'cake' they would split it between 8, struggle to finish their slice and be stuffed until Christmas.

Possibly I just need to halve whatever it says. I did make my own lemon loaf in a 1lb tin and it divided into five decent (but not massive) slices so roughly just over double suggested portion.

I do think it should be mandatory to have a weight in the headline like other goods. I did have a Google (clearly bored) and cakes can be sold by servings as an exemption to weights snd measures act but they can not be misleadingly small.

Mmmmmmm….lemon loaf 😋x

We've had three birthday cakes recently so I did the maths out of curiosity. It seems pretty consistent that retailers consider ~65g to be one serving.

And apparently I'm very consistent in eyeballing ~85g a serving as that's basically what I've cut it into every time.

I ended up chopping it up and freezing some for when I want a chocolate fix. It was delicious and £3.50

I don’t have a cake here to weigh the slice I’d consider a reasonable serving, but I’m quite sure it would be nearer 100g than 39g!

It’s like porridge, nutritional info on the bag is based on a 40g serving, my usual bowl of porridge is at least 80g, plus a sooonful of flaxseeds, and sets me up for day. I’d be hungry mid-morning if I had a 40g portion.

Someone a couple of villages from me has set up a “cake shed” in her back garden, open for a day or two once or twice a month, and her individually packaged slices are £3.50-£4.50. And from her reels on Facebook, she sells out. They can’t be 39g slices!

My porridge portion is also massive bowl! It doesn’t really annoy me in the same way as it’s sold by metric weight (like nearly all other foodstuffs) rather than non-standardised servings.

I feel like that takes impressive levels of willpower. I really want a brownie now.

It’s like porridge, nutritional info on the bag is based on a 40g serving, my usual bowl of porridge is at least 80g, plus a sooonful of flaxseeds, and sets me up for day. I’d be hungry mid-morning if I had a 40g portion

Lol. I'm currently using Lindsay Wilson's Filling Meals book to lose weight. The premise is that you have two high fibre, high protein 500 calorie meals for breakfast and lunch and what ever you want for dinner, within reason, given that you've already had a decent amount of nutrition by then so won't be very hungry so dinner can be small.

The porridge recipe I like most is 40 g oats, 35 g all bran, 200 g fat free Greek yogurt and a spoon of Nutella.

Literally 3 breakfasts in one going by recommended portions. It's working too, both in terms of being filing and for weight loss.

I have no idea how much slices of cake weigh though, but have always found the serving suggestion tiny, eg those round 'luxury' cakes that all the supermarkets sell in similar flavours that apparently serve 6. But for coffee or brownie shop cake slices,they're generally more than I want, but not quite enough for 2 portions.

Latest research in my kitchen reveals that a portion of a small fruit cake (serves 8 by the way) is 50g and is just the right amount to go with my afternoon mug of tea.

That's the whole cake serves 8, not one 50g slice.

50g for 8…you’d have to each just lick it 🤣

50g for 1 sounds much better.

You serve big slices. Modern servings are bigger, traditionally that 1lb came would have done up to 10 slices.

I make lemon cake in a 1lb loaf tin too, and I get eight slices out of it.

I possibly am just greedy but I don’t think I could of gotten 10 slices unless I had a bread slicer. Possibly 7 but There’s five of us and it seemed better for everyone to have the same whilst it was still warm rather than leave a couple of slices.