Is it cheaper to buy baked goods than make them?

[BQ91]

I thought I would give baking a go again, had some flour, baking soda, cocoa powder already but needed to get some eggs butter and choc chips. I spent £8 on this. I did buy 10 eggs though.
I had recently bought 18 brownies online (different flavoured ones) and spent £18. I thought baking would end up being cheaper in the long run and maybe it is but i can’t work that out financially as my maths isn’t good. Is baking just more for fun instead of being cost effective?

It’s cheaper to bake than to buy. It isn’t at first because when you buy ingredients you end up buying enough for many pans of Brownies.

The best way to work it out would be to think on say you buy a 1.5kg bag of self-raising flour and the brownie recipe calls for 200g, then you know you have enough flour to make 7 batches of brownies.

So you would divide the cost of one bag of flour by 7 to get the cost per batch of brownies. Repeat with all ingredients and it will be clear that it is cheaper to bake than buy.

Most dry baking ingredients have a long shelf life too, so you don’t have to make brownies every week to use them up by a best by date. So it’s worth the initial cost to get a baking pantry going and then top it up.

I agree with @HadalyEve
its cheaper to bake especially if you are using butter, many baked goods don’t have butter in them to make them cheaper.

I think it depends on the quality of what you are baking. The nicest cinammon buns ever are made by a baker round the corner from me and are £3.50 each (!). I could probably make 10 for less than £35.

A coffee and walnut cake (perfectly nice) from the coop is £3.25...Could I make if for less than that. Probably not. But if I did it would be all butter..no palm oil etc.

Baking isn't particularly cheap if you are making nice stuff.

Read the list of ingredients on bought cake. Is that what you want?

Think it is probably not much cheaper, but is usually.nicer,even if u are just a passable baker

I mean, if you're going to spend £18 on brownies, then yes it's a lot cheaper to make your own!

It is cheaper (imo, haven’t costed it out) to bake than to buy a similar level of cake. You can definitely buy cheaper cakes, but they do not taste anything like even the most basic home baked sponge cake. If you buy a ‘naive’ cake, that peanut taste like generic shop cake, then it is definitely more expensive than baking.

I always buy the cheapest flour (I think it may be up to 70p now) after working in a posh restaurant and they had won awards for their desserts made from cheap flour!

It's the butter and eggs now that ramp things up!

I'm always asked for my brownie recipe which costs
Rough costs-
Chocolate 40p (I buy Molly's cheap stuff)
Butter £1.50
Flour 20p
Sugar 50p
Cocoa powder 10p
Egg 25p

So cheaper than buying an individual one.

Victoria sandwich
Again it's the butter and eggs that make it cost but still cheaper (jam is really pricey now but I sometimes make my own with frozen strawberries).

I enjoy it though so worth it!

Well £18 for 18 brownies is alot! Even if you use a mix it's about £7 to home bake, say £8 if you include the oven heating up. Of course this does not include your time, but time is why buying is more expensive.
Mass produced bake goods would be cheaper though - less than £2 for a small chocolate cake from Tesco.

Its more expensive to make it yourself. You can buy a whole tub of cocoa powder for the price of a cheap chocolate cake serving 4

I made 50 scones at the weekend for a garden party. I ran out of flour so sent dh to buy more and he commented that it might be cheaper and easier to just buy the scones instead.

I spent £10 on ingredients but to buy 50 scones would be about £20 depending on supermarket. Plus I like baking and my scones were massive

I buy 70% chocolate from Lidl and chop it up small. Much cheaper than ready made choc chips.

It's way more expensive for me to make a victoria sponge than it is to buy one in the supermarket. But it's WAY cheaper for me to make one, than to buy one of the quality I can make, from a bakery. They're not the same product, at all!

Ffs ‘naice’ cake, that doesn’t taste like generic shop cake. Fat fingers and autocorrect!

It’s such a varied question and largely dependent on whether you esteem quality vs convenience.
Price/quality/quantity/convenience

Its a big push and pull between these factors and largely you’ll break even.

Let’s take fairy cakes as an example. 12 for £1.75 at Asda. They are perfectly nice but highly synthetic and cheaply made. If you made them yourself using the absolute cheapest of ingredients you could probably get it the same value or cheaper (unless you count your Labour in which case it’s always going to be more expensive) but you wouldn’t want to use those cheap ingredients so ultimately you’d spend more making your own, but they’re also likely to be better quality and contain more in quantity.

I bake a lot, it’s something I really enjoy but that being said I’ll often buy items I don’t care about quality/quantity of as much because it’s just not worth baking them.

kids birthday party cakes for example- never worth making. No one appreciates them and they’ll just end up on the floor or rammed into party bags, always buy them!

I realise I just rambled - essentially no it’s not always cheaper to bake in fact it can be much more expensive. You need to take it on a case by case situation and figure out what matters to you and what you want to achieve.

Is baking just more for fun instead of being cost effective?

Home baking tastes far better than cheap, mass produced supermarket baking.

The price of gas or electricity on top of the ingredients (and how much you value your time) all need to be factored in. Also the washing up!!

Cheaper to bake yourself. Don't waste the oven either, pop a pizza on the bottom shelf. Things take ages to cook on the bottom shelf so it should be done when the cake is. The other thing about shop bought cake is it's cold. Nothing better than hot fresh cake 🍰

I think it's probably cheaper to bake yourself, depending on what it is and your set up. We have chickens, so endless eggs that go to waste if we don't use them, and most other things are pretty simple ingredients, flour, baking powder, sugar, bit of electricity, which I'm sure must cost less than driving 40 minutes round trip to our nearest sizable shop.

As others have said, you can buy a cheaper cake from the supermarket, but to buy an equivalent one from a posh farm shop, it’s cheaper to make your own. I make the most amazing cinnamon rolls which cost about £3 to make 12, to buy them in a posh bakery, they’d be £3 each easily. I made scones this weekend, they were unbelievably good and it probably cost £1.50 to make 12 of them. Better tasting and texture than you’d get in a National Trust cafe!

Cheaper and nicer to bake your own.

Depends on quantity, if you just want a small cake it's cheaper to buy, £2.20 in lidl gets one that's perfectly nice serving 4. If i want to serve 12 it will cost me around £4 in ingredients to make one plus electric, tastes far better.

You need to compare like with like, shop cake won't be made with real butter, lots of raising agents and less eggs for instance.

Not sure where costs £8 for choc chips, eggs and butter. Try Lidl!

This recipe costs about £8.50 if you order the ingredients online. You would end up with eggs, cocoa powder and flour to use for other recipes. So, maybe £7, and I would only use granulated sugar which is cheaper. I suppose you should add fuel, but I only bake at the weekends when the oven is on for other things.

Two naan breads cost between 65p and £1.20, so between £2.60 and £4.80 for eight - whole list of ingredients on the back of the pack. To make at home, costs 15p worth of flour, blob of yeast (free from supermarket) salt and scattering nigella sees (costing pennies), couple of spoonfuls of yogurt and water.

Home made is nicer than what you buy in a supermarket and uses better ingredients. That said, I enjoy baking and I have the time. At other times in my life, I didn't have that time, so shop bought it was.

Not sure on cost but I bake almost daily as the chemical crap in shop bought cakes and biscuits have utterly ruined the taste. Fresh is soooo much nicer