Is a food allergy/intolerance-friendly cake sale a good or bad idea?

[treehugga]

So there are loads of cake sales at school. We have several allergies in our family so we just walk on by and usually there's a lot of complaining on the way home. There are at least 3 other mums from our class alone who also don't let their kids buy cakes for allergy/intolerance reasons. But at home we all know how to cook great alternatives that pass for the dairy/wheat/egg versions.

So I'm thinking how about a cake sale that is specially for those kids with allergies, made by the parents who know what works? Or is that the most insane idea ever as really there is a risk of cross-contamination in any home kitchen and even with warnings in place a bad reaction to a good that someone else has cooked would not be a good outcome. Alternatively, maybe parents of kids who have severe reactions won't go near it anyway?

I imagine there wouldn't be enough interest to make it worthwhile. Just bake at home on the days when there'll be a bake sale at school?

There are some children at dds school with special diets. At events their parents have sent in special cakes etc for them so they can still be involved.

Maybe you could have a table or and end of a table for allergy freindly stuff so they could partake with the rest of thw school. Also helps the children make good choices (with a nudge from the adults)

Let me put it another way, if you were at a cake stall labelled 'allergy-friendly' and one of the cakes was free from your trigger foods, would you buy for your child or not?

Bear in mind that the cakes will be baked in home kitchens and there's a list of ingredients for each recipe.

I would but DS is not anaphylactic, he just vomits. I think if the allergy was more serious I might be more careful. It sounds like it might be a good thing to run alongside the normal bake sale.

I think people are ordinarily suspicious of cakes baked in unknown homes. I think someone who needs to be absolutely certain that a food is safe would be very reluctant to buy anything from a cake stall regardless of what it is supposed to contain or who baked it.

For the stall organiser it sounds like a disaster. How can you as vendor be certain everything is correctly labelled and all the rules have been followed? What happens if something goes wrong?

I wouldn't organise this, because I am a control freak and would want to have supervised the baking of every single cake. People forget the most obvious things (like marzipan being made from almonds) and of course the risk of cross contamination is quite high.

As the parent of a child with severe allergies, I wouldn't buy from a stall like this unless I knew the parents who had baked the cake and trusted them quite a lot. I would also want the cakes to be wrapped so that they couldn't be contaminated on the stall.

I might be more confident if there was a full ingredient list for every cake, along with a sign that said something along the lines of "we have taken great care to keep these cakes free from xxx and we cleaned out whole kitchen before beginning to cook" - but there would have to be a disclaimer to make it clear that there were no guarantees.

Agree that it sounds like a wonderful idea, and I hope you can make it work.

I always send in clearly labelled dairy and gluten free cakes (inc a label of what they do contain) to school cake sales and they always sell well. As a coeliac I trust that anyone who knows enough to make and label will have taken all the care they can

Yes Dibbler, that's a good point. Anyone who knows enough to make clear labels listing every ingredient is likely to be trustworthy.

I still think I would need to know the parents who baked the cake. .. but then I am a complete control freak, and ds could well have an anaphylactic reaction to traces.

It's a lovely, inclusive idea. I, however, would not have bought from such a stall at the time when my dc needed to avoid a particular ingredient - and they were not having anaphylactic reactions.

As for the 'not fair' reactions...sorry, tough. My dc need to learn to live in the real world and accept that they cannot just have anything.

A compromise we have come to in our school is that parents of children with allergies make cajes and goodies which are wrapped and fully-labeled. These cakes are kept behind the main stall. Either the parent buys their own cakes, or they buy from cakes made by other allergy-experienced parents, whose cooking they trust. Once these families have had a chance to buy from their own range, the cakes are put out on the table with the rest of the food.

When we have a cake sale at our school I make my own and they label it up so they keep it behind the stall and we can buy it back later. Dd is quite happy with that, she just wants to take part in buying some cakes.