Baking on a Budget

I have put together a post filled with hints and tips on how you can continue baking on a budget.

With the cost-of-living crisis, a lot of people are having to give up their hobbies such as baking.

 Baking is such a fun hobby, whether you are baking by yourself or with children. It is also such a great stress release and perfect for helping with our mental health.  

With all that being said I have put together some tips and tricks to ensure that you can still continue to bake even during the Cost-of-Living Crisis.  

Budget Baking Section  

To help you decide what recipes you can bake based on your budget I have introduced a new section on A Spoonful of Vanilla. This is a section on my website where you can search depending on your budget.  

Just head over to the Budget Baking section to find recipes that cost under £5, £10, £15 and £20 to bake.  

I always get so frustrated when I see a recipe that says it can be made for under £5. However, normally it turns out that it is £5 per portion and the recipe makes 4 portions so to make the recipe would cost £20.  

That isn’t the same with my Budget Baking section. The cost is for the entire bake. If you pick, for example, to make my Banoffee Pie recipe it will cost you less than £5 for all of the ingredients.  

The budget baking section doesn’t take into account the cost of any of the equipment you require to bake it. It is solely the ingredients.  

Baking Spread/Unsalted Butter 

The vast majority of recipes will call for butter or a baking spread. In most cakes you can use either unsalted butter or a baking spread like Stork.  

Both of these can be pretty expensive and Stork can be substituted for a supermarket own brand baking spread. It can also be substituted for a Supermarket’s own brand soft spread.

Related Posts

How to be More Eco-Friendly When Baking

Let’s Chat…10 Bad Baking Habits You Need to Break

Let’s Chat…How To Freeze Your Bakes

Supermarket Own Brand Products  

Supermarkets have such a fab range of own-brand baking products. ASDA is probably my favourite at the moment. They have such a wide range of baking products including icing sugar and caster sugar.  

A lot of people believe that to get a better bake on a product you need to use a branded or more expensive flour. This isn’t true at all and supermarkets’ budget range of flour works just as well. I have used both supermarket budget ranges and branded and always get the same outcome with my bakes.  

Another supermarket’s own brand product that I use quite often is light brown sugar. This is something I use a lot especially if I am baking cookies or chocolate cake. Most supermarkets have their own brand of sugar, including light brown, caster, icing and dark brown sugar. The price difference between these and the branded version can be quite significant.  

Decorations/Food Colouring  

Once you have baked your cake you are going to want to decorate it and make it look lovely and pretty. This doesn’t need to be expensive either.  

Supermarkets like ASDA and Tesco have such a fab range of food colourings, sprinkles and other cake decorations.  

Supermarkets’ food colourings are normally water-based so you won’t get a super bright vibrant colour with them. You will get a good colour, but you might end up using a lot of food colouring to get it.  

I have noticed that a lot of supermarkets have their own sprinkle mixes now too. In previous years I have often gone online to places like The Cake Decorating Company or Cake Craft Company to get sprinkle mixes. They are now a lot more widely available.  

Depending on your budget you can also get sprinkles online in different sized packs, of course, the smaller the pack the smaller the price. This is perfect if you are just going to use the sprinkles for one set of cupcakes or a cake. I would recommend Twist Ingredients for smaller pouches of sprinkles, some of their sprinkles can be bought in pouches as little as 25g. 

Cake Tins  

One of the most expensive parts of baking can be buying cake and muffin tins. If you are just starting out I would recommend only buying the tins that you need. For example, don’t go out and buy lots of different-sized and shaped cake tins because you think you might need them. Decide what you want to bake and buy the tin for that specific bake.  

You can get a lot of cake tins from supermarkets, also shops like Home Bargains, The Range and B&M have fab baking ranges. These tend to be the cheaper option compared with Amazon or stores like Lakeland. Of course, supermarkets aren’t going to have every shaped tin like a dinosaur or 12-inch square but they do have the more widely used tins like 20cm round tins, loaf tins and muffin trays.  

Yellow Sticker Items  

So this may be an option for you and it might not be, but I thought I would mention it just in case.  

In every supermarket, you will find items with yellow stickers. These are normally items with a short shelf life that have been reduced to half price or less. The items with the yellow stickers on will change daily and depend on which items need to be sold quickly.  

I love checking out the yellow sticker items or the clearance sections in supermarkets because you can get some absolute bargains and most of the fresh items can be frozen. For example, if you manage to get unsalted butter in the clearance or reduced section this can be frozen to bake with later. Just remember to defrost before using.  

In the ambient section of supermarkets, I always find baking products in the reduced or clearance section. Mostly it will be cake decorations which have a best-before date rather than a use by. This means that they are still perfectly good to use after that date but may lose their quality. 

The vast majority of cake decorations are made from sugar which means that they could be perfectly good to use for years after their best-before date.  

There are normally lots of yellow sticker items or clearance items after holidays like Christmas and Easter. This is perfect for stocking up on items that you need, that can be kept pasted their best before date or frozen to use later.  

Shop Around  

Finally, another way to ensure that you are getting the best deals on your baking products is to shop around. 

This may mean having to visit several different supermarkets or shops to get everything you need to bake; but it will also help you to save money.  

For example, if you need to buy Caster Sugar, you could get this out of Tesco. However, they only have a branded version. If you visit Asda or Aldi for example, they have their own brand versions which is 75p cheaper. B&M have caster sugar which is £1.50 cheaper than the Tesco branded version!  

Another benefit of shopping around is getting the ingredients in the quantity that you need. If we take the caster sugar example from above, Tesco only sell caster sugar in 1kg bags. But, if you are making a cake and you only need 300g of caster sugar then you may end up with a lot of waste.  

If you were to get your Caster Sugar in Morrisons you could buy 500g instead. Sainsbury’s and B&M also sell sugar in 500g bags. This means you will spend less money but also waste less as well.  

If you do have any questions about this Baking on a Budget post or any other recipes on my blog you can contact me either by sending me a DM on social media or an email. You can find all my details on the right-hand side of this page.