Village fete cake stall - your bestsellers, please

[stealthsquiggle]

I am just wrapping my head around the fact that the village fete is a different audience from school cake sales. Small village, complete mix from octogenarians to families with young children (and since the fete is an afternoon/evening affair with barbeque and band and bar, maybe even some teenagers/ young and child-free adults).

I need to make a fairly substantial contribution. All suggestions welcome, the cheaper to bake the better.... So far it will be as many banana cakes as I can get cheap bananas for, some Manor cakes, cake pops, and.....???

Lemon drizzle cakes mmmmmmm

Banana loaf

Cookies?

I know this is heresy on MN, but I have never found Lemon Drizzle an easy one to get right and have never really established what I am doing wrong .

Cookies - big squidgey ones? Individually, or in batches? Could work, if I can find a recipe to make ahead of time and bake at the last minute...

Having just looked in the freezer, something involving apple and/or plums might be called for.

From what you say they are aimed at people eating at the fete/bbq so lots of buns (cupcakes?), cookies, shortbread, rocky road etc that are easy to hold/eat on the move. Sparkly decorations and huge amounts of pester power will kick in !

iseenodust that is one of the things I am dithering about - previous fetes have been lunchtime affairs and people bought cakes to take home - but I think this one may be more "eat on the spot" stuff due to the timing except that there is a tea tent and a BBQ as well and if I take all their business I will be drummed out of the village.

Pester power cakes I can do - I just don't know if I should....

Have you ever tried Welsh Cakes? Easy to do and a basic recipe makes about 20 ... which is good for a cake stall! They go down vv well with all ages when I have made them for fetes.

small victoria sponge sandwiches always go well

nice dark sticky gingerbread....rachel allen's recipe is A-mazing

people will also want to buy something to eat NOW, so muffins/fairy cakes/gingerbread men

I've never done this, but I have been told a lot of American bake sales make MASSIVE cakes and sell them by the slice...if you have paper plates and napkins you could easily do this. Take a roll of cling film and folks could buy a selection to take home!

Sliced cakes and loaf cakes seem to go down well with the older customers - I've tried to sell cake pops to the over thirties and they could not compute had no idea what they were.

Banana cakes always seem to be the last to sell at any cake stall I've been involved with.
Standard sized and not over decorated chocolate cakes (i.e. filled and iced but no fancy stuff) always sell very well as well as victoria sponges with jam filling and icing/caster sugar sprinkled on top.

We had cake stall a couple of weeks ago. It was an afternoon thing and people were buying cakes to take home. We did sell some as slices which did work really well - particularly with some of the stickier cakes

The best seller was coffee cake. They all went in 1st hour.

loads of good ideas - thank you all.

I need to write a list tonight, I think - trying to hit the balance between "old fashioned" cakes for the 'take it home for tea' market, and pester power ones for immediate consumption (cake pops and cupcakes went down a storm with the children at the village jubilee party, but the parents weren't being asked to pay for them...) Welsh cakes sound like a good return on investment, too. I have little bags which would be ideal for small batches of welsh cakes / cookies.

One of my concerns is packaging. Victoria sandwiches and the like I can wrap on disposable plates, loaf cakes just get neatly clingfilmed, cookies/welsh cakes and cake pops I have bags for, but short of expensive boxes, how could I package fairy cakes/ cup cakes?

Oh, and point taken about banana cakes, Lilymaid. Mine (heavily laced with chocolate chips) have usually sold reasonably well in the past, but maybe I will focus my efforts elsewhere this time.

Victoria sandwiches and the like freeze well (unfilled), don't they?

rocky road, always a hit with kids, adults, everyone! easy to transport wrapped in a bit of foil

Tiffin always goes down well. No need to bake either.

Meringues. Always very popular, really easy and you can make nests and fill with strawberries, sandwich them together with cream, dip in chocolate or just sell in bags for people to do what they want with.

All cakes with butter icing of any flavour but particularly lemon or orange or carrot or chocolate.

Chocolate brownies
Flapjacks
Dutch apple cake

A nice gf/df cake or two. Anyone with allergies will be delighted to buy greedy amounts some, and often can't get anything elsewhere.

Spiced apple cake would be lovely, maybe a plum streusel ?

Brownies, definitely - just slice up and pop in a paper bag.

Don't forget the older customer always appreciates fruit cake, either a small loaf to take home or some individual slices. Fruit cake is best left a couple of days before cutting so need not be frozen at all if fete is on Saturday. Look at 'Sticky Tea Bread' at Deliaonline - I normally baake 2 or 3 in one go. Also, how about carrot cake - if you make it as a sandwich cake, you don't have the frosting sticking to your packaging. For biscuits, there is a fantastic Phil Vickery recipe done with Condensed Milk - yes, it is Nestle Carnation recipe, but there are other brands of Condensed Milk you can use. This is my favourite biscuit recipe because they stay crunchy for 2-3 days after making and there are lots of variations to the basic dough eg, milk choc and hazelnut, raspberry and white choc, orange zest and cinnamon. I never make brownies for a cake sale as the ingredients are so expensive. Mary Berry has a lot of traybake recipes which are great for making piles of cake slices quickly and cheaply - they are all variations on a sponge theme, eg choc., orange and sultana, lemon drizzle. Finally, you could always do some scones - cheap but do have to be made on the day.

We just did a cake stall for the school on the village market. The biggest sellers were Bara brith & Welsh cakes (probably due to the fact that we are in Wales!) but the one thing that surprised me by selling really quickly was packs of Scotch pancakes.

Rocky road also sold very well but of course costs more to make.

Brownies most popular.

Least popular are slices of a big cake covered in buttercream/frosting - too sweet, too tricky to eat.

I do carrot and orange muffins, always sell really well

OP, small clear plastic cups are great for popping fairy cakes/cupcakes in - see here for ideas - www.cookiemadness.net/2011/04/packaging-cupcakes/

Things like scotch pancakes and welsh cakes which are high margin (not that I am charging for ingredients, but YKWIM) definitely appeal.

If I can get to the shops today to get some cheap dried fruit and soak it overnight, I will do some "tea loaf" type fruit cake, and maybe a "proper" fruit cake to slice.

Plastic cups for cupcakes are a genius solution (and so obvious when you think about it) - thank you elliephant.

I completely failed to make the cake pops (with machine) last night - I made 2 "manor" cakes (light fruit cake a la Mr Kipling) and went to bed .