Packed Lunch Cake - it's frugal, filling and delicious....

I’ve always been a fan of packed lunches and in the past, I’ve written about the fact that I could make a healthy and filling packed lunch for around half the price of a school dinner which has saved me a fortune over the years.

With both of mine in senior school from September, I’m no longer going to be making packed lunches but I’ve just made a final batch of our favourite home made packed lunch cake so I thought I’d share the recipe with you on here again and update the costings for 2016 to show that it’s still a very frugal way to get something sweet into your child’s packed lunch.

Here’s the 2012 version:

These days the cake costs me £1.25 to make in comparison to the £1.05 I worked it out to be back in 2012 but the increase in cost is more due to the fact that I had to slightly up the quantities as I replaced the silicon baking tray I used to have with a slightly larger one. Most of the individual costs have actually gone down when you look at how much they were then and how much they are now which was actually quite surprising. *

How to make packed lunch cake

200g self raising flour = 6p (Value flour 1.5kg for 45p)
200g sugar = 12p (1kg for 59p)
200g butter or margarine = 44p (Stork Margarine 500g for £1.10)
3 eggs = 45p (Free range eggs 6 for 89p)
Vanilla essence = 3p
Icing Sugar = 15p (£1.55 for 1kg)

Cream the margarine and the sugar together in a mixing bowl..
Add the eggs and the vanilla and and give it a good mix.
Bit by bit, stir in the flour
Pour the cake batter into a greased baking tray (I’m a fan of silicon bakeware for this cake).
Bake your cake in a preheated oven at around 200 c until your cake is looking golden on top – I’m not going to specify a time as it depends on the size of the cake tins you use and the thickness of the cake. I start my time off at 15 mins and take it from there.
When the cake is completely cool, mix the icing sugar with some water and ice the top of the cake. The icing sugar mix needs to be not to runny but not too stiff as you want it to spread easily but not run straight off the top.

This amount of mixture makes 20 small sponge squares which works out to just 6p each if you don’t include the sprinkles I usually add on the top to make it a bit more interesting. 😉

Rather than using icing sugar to ice the cakes today, I used a pack of candy melts that I bought from Approved Food for about 29p last month. They’re just out of date but it’s Best Before date so that’s not a problem.

The squares aren’t huge but they’re enough to go in a packed lunch without incurring the wrath of the school packed lunch police who have been known to confiscate food that’s deemed as too sugary. Personally, I think that everything is good in moderation for kids and because I always made sure that I added at least one piece of fruit I had no worries about adding cake too.

Here’s the 2016 version:

*I used the Tesco website for prices as that’s the easiest one to pop on and get costs for everything I use. The prices will be different wherever you shop and most of these ingredients you’ll have in anyway I would think.

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