Photo: chrisdonia / Flickr

A cake sale is a great way to make money for charity – and it can be a lot of fun. Cake sales require virtually no initial investment, and it’s an event that everyone with even the simplest baking skills can involved in. Get together some friends to help out with the baking and organisation, and prepare to put together a great fundraiser for the charity of your choice.

What to bake

Cupcakes and brownies are always safe bets, but you can also get more interesting with muffins, pies, cookies, squares, and bigger cakes. Get everyone who’s donating something to the sale to let you know ahead of time what it is that they’ll be bringing along so that you don’t get too many repeats.

Package deal

Photo: Rachel from Cupcakes Take the Cake / Flickr

Consider packaging up some of the items – particularly cookies – in bags, to encourage people to buy more of them at once.You can also come up with other ideas to keep things interesting: hold a raffle for one of the bigger cakes, branch out and sell cups of coffee or hot chocolate, or have ‘special offers’ that change throughout the day as you see what’s selling best and what needs some promotion.

Setting up

Keep the decoration of your cake sale as simple as possible, because that’s the best way to show off the baked goods to their best advantage. Have serviettes on hand so that people can carry stickier cakes without getting too messy, and keep your cakes and cookies fresh by keeping them in sealed containers and only displaying small quantities at a time. Display signs letting anyone walking past how much everything costs and what your special offers are, then prepare to make a great profit for charity!

Tags: baking, charity