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.....???

Bread pudding

Chelsea buns (do dough in breadmaker if you have one)

Rock cakes

Scones - fruit, plain and cheese. Charge, say, 50p for a scone then 10p for butter, 15p for jam and have some plastic knives for spreading. 5 for £2 in a bag.

I'm baking my contribution to the village fete tonight: shortbread cut into flower shapes with a white chocolate rainbow drop in the middle, pressed in while they're cooling - looks v pretty. Am going to bag them up into 5s or 6s (or whatever looks reasonably generous) in clear bags from Lakeland, tied with some curly ribbon.

I'm also offloading two Bags for Life full of rashly bought celebrity cookbooks

For selling power and good profit, coffee cake, Victoria sponge, chocolate cake. I always work out the likely price charged and work out profit. It's not that I charge for ingredients, but if they're going to make less than I've spent then I might as well give them the cash. Fruit cakes, brownies or other cakes with chocolate rather than cocoa and cupcakes with loads of sweets or expensive sprinkles can fall into that category. I use stork for cake sale (and other cakes actually) for that reason and I dont think the taste is impaired. But I use butter for biscuits. Another one that sells well is a vanilla tray bake-basically just Victoria sponge mix in a large rectangular tin with vanilla buttercream.

At ours last weekend one woman made some Olympic torches. They were basically cupcakes made using flat bottomed icecream cones instead of paper cases and iced red and yellow to look like flames. Proved a topical talking point and very popular.

I usually do gingerbread men and fruit cake

runs out for flat-bottomed ice cream cones.

Torches sound fab but I am currently resisting all demands (from my DC) for theming.

So far I have 2 manor cakes, 2 sticky tea loaves, and 50 cake pops on sticks but not iced (and in the freezer). Tomorrow is sponges, coating cake pops, and possibly cup cakes.

Well, I ended up with cake pops, victoria and chocolate sponges, sticky fruit tea loaves, one banana and choc chip loaf, and loads of mars bar crispy cake.

Mars bar cake sold best, but it all sold in the end (well, there were a few cake pops left, but I handed those over to the people running the BBQ in the evening and they sold them instead). It was just as well I didn't take cupcakes, really, as the woman running the tea tent had cupcakes and would have hated me for ever for stealing her trade.

Thanks for your input, everyone.

Well done stealth- that sounds like an amazing effort