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Baking a cake is no longer a cheap thrill

The soaring cost of ingredients means home-made treats can be pricey. Xanthe Clay has some tips

Adelicious response to rising food prices is: “Let them eat cake.” What better way, after all, to soothe the soul than by combining butter, sugar, eggs and flour to make a perfectly soft sponge for one’s tea?

But, even if it were practical, it turns out these days we can afford much less cake. Yes, food inflation fell last month, for the first time in almost two years. But that doesn’t mean the prices went down. It just means they went up a little less quickly than the month before.

It’s still the second-highest rate of food inflation since records began in 2005. Our weekly shop is more expensive than ever – and there is no prospect of prices going into reverse.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to humble home baking. Take butter, which has hit the headlines recently. Arla, the Danishbased dairy cooperative, has just reduced the size of its packs of Lurpak and Anchor butter from the standard 250g to 200g; 200g of Lurpak comes in at £2.15 while 200g of Anchor is £1.80.

At a cursory glance – all that most of us have time for on the supermarket dash – this looks pretty good next to own-brand butter, which costs between £1.89 and £2 for 250g. “I saw the price and thought, ‘That’s OK,’ as the packs look much the same from the front”, says Rachel Lucas, a baker who gets through 6kg butter a week for her business, Sugar Moon Brownies. “It’s not until you pick them up that you realise that they are slimmer. I put them straight back.”

Next, eggs. My receipts from the end of 2019 (yes! I still have them) show that two-dozen large, free-range eggs from Sainsbury’s cost £2.15. Now, you’ll part with £3.60 for the same boxful. That’s a rise of £1.45 – or 67 per cent – in just three and a half years. That hard-earned £2.15 you shelled out in 2019 to buy 12 eggs, today would bag you just seven. It goes on: 200g sugar cost 15p in 2019 and is now 21p; selfraising flour has gone up from 9p to 11p for 200g.

So how did we get here?

Inflation really started to pick up when the pandemic hit, and the price of our groceries today is more than a quarter higher than it was pre-Covid, meaning £1’s worth of shopping at the end of 2019 now costs us £1.26. “Shrinkflation” is back, with manufacturers reducing the sizes of products while keeping the price the same.

We tend to notice this more with our treats, and are most likely to complain about shrinking chocolate bars (I’m still smarting that Mars Bars have been proven to be 18 per cent smaller than they were in 1996). But it’s hitting all sorts of products now, and it’s hard not to conclude that manufacturers hope we won’t notice.

In the last year, spreads including Flora, Bertoli and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter have reduced their pack sizes by 10 per cent, from 500g to

450g, and some supermarkets have followed suit with their own brands. Magnum ice creams in multipacks have reduced from 110g each to 100g, packs of Club and Penguin chocolate bars are to hold seven, rather than eight, biscuits each, and Tesco has shrunk its entire ready meal range by 50g.

It’s not just food: all sorts of everyday essentials are falling victim to the shrinking disease. A study in September 2022 by trolley.co.uk for

The Telegraph showed that toilet paper had got 15 per cent more expensive while also delivering 8 per cent fewer sheets. Consumer champion Martin Lewis’s MoneySavingExpert.com has a whole thread devoted to the subject, which makes for eye-opening reading, as eagle-eyed contributors log changes such as Whiskas cat food pouches (shrunk from 100g to 85g), and Dove soap which now comes in 90g, rather than 100g, bars. There’s another kind of sneaky reduction going on too, in quality. Last Christmas’s mince pies were noticeably less good than previous years, as manufacturers battled to match the prices while the cost of ingredients soared.

Shoppers aren’t fooled: a survey commissioned by Red Tractor last year showed that our trust in the quality of supermarket food is down 20 per cent. Spotted that your favourite biscuit has fewer chocolate chips than last month, or the eggs in a ready meal are no longer free range, or bacon in the quiche is cheaper, lower-welfare Danish rather than British? This sort of “product reformulation” is inevitable if retailers and manufacturers are to safeguard their profit margins. Over the next few months, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the packaging small print – even when it’s hidden under a flap and so small I have to take a photograph and enlarge it just to read it. Convenient or conspiracy? I couldn’t possibly comment.

So what can we do to tackle the creeping costs of food while still eating well? Often it’s about cutting back on expensive proteins like meat and fish. Lucas says she’s eating fish once a week now rather than three times, while chef Stephen Higginson, chef proprietor of the Square Bistro in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, has swapped from cod to coley. “It’s very similar to cod, but a bit firmer, less flakey. Cod has gone up 30, 40 per cent, while coley is half the price.” He avoids traditional butter sauces too, because of soaring costs and the need to keep prices reasonable for customers. “Instead, we serve it with a nice dressing with hazelnuts and local rapeseed or olive oil,” he says. Above all, you need to be nimble and adaptable, he continues, “or you’ll be paralysed. Prices are changing day by day.”

While Higginson deals with potato prices up 70 per cent, Bristol-based fermentation expert Dr Caroline Gilmartin has been scouring the vegetable section to keep costs down. She freezes the finds that can’t be eaten straight away. “Last week, I bought four bags of cavolo nero for 10p a bag, blanched it and froze it. Veg which might be a bit ropey for a salad is still great for a soup, and again will freeze fine.” Her final advice for saving money at the supermarket? “Avoid the bloody place. Make a list of everything you have, and use it up first.” Ingredients gathering dust in the cupboard or frost in the freezer is something most of us can relate to – a quick skim of my larder reveals a glut of barely used items including dried dill (might as well be grass clippings) and a dozen different kinds of vinegar.

Devon-based writer Orlando Murrin is on a mission to stop food lingering. “I continue to try new recipes, with enthusiasm, but am less likely to purchase specialist ingredients (eg half a teaspoon of this or that) when I’m not convinced they’ll make an appreciable difference.”

There may be a slight loss of authenticity but, “I’m wasting less.” Antiques seller Sasha Wilkins (@ foundbysashawilkins on Instagram) tells me about two swaps she adopted during lockdown when money was “super tight” and has maintained as costs rise: “table salt for all cooking instead of just mindlessly reaching for Maldon from salt pig, which is now just for finishing, and cafetière [coffee] instead of capsules most days.” Like many of us, she’s also stopped buying tins of beans in favour of cooking her own and freezing them.

On the subject of changing shopping habits, swapping to cheaper own brands can make sense, but as I’ve found out to my cost, budget brands aren’t guaranteeably good value.

Take Mary Ann’s Dairy Italian-style hard cheese from Sainsbury’s. It’s £2.80 for a 200g block, or £14/kg. But proper Grana Padano is only £15/kg from the same supermarket, and with its better flavour you’ll need less. Incidentally, using Grana Padano as a substitute for ultra-expensive Parmesan (around £25/ kg) is the sort of hack even Italians resort to. Grana doesn’t have the same depth of flavour, but it will give savoury heft all the same.

As for our cake, there are ways to reduce the cost. Fuel is still an issue, costing over 33p per kilowatt hour (kWh) in most parts of the country, compared with around 19.4p per kWh pre-pandemic and Ukraine war. That nearly doubles the cost of baking the sponge, from 19p to 33p. Turning the oven off 10 minutes early and letting the cake finish in the residual heat will help save fuel and money.

You could look at butter alternatives, too, as it’s one of the costliest ingredients. Because margarine contains chemical emulsifiers it will give a lighter result than butter: Mary Berry swears by it. Your sponge won’t have the same flavour though, and a read of the ingredients list on the margarine packet is pretty unappetising. If you are trying to avoid ultra processed foods – and who isn’t? – then a mild olive oil or rapeseed oil is another option. You’ll need less, as butter is about 80 per cent fat, while oil is pretty much 100 per cent. So a four-egg sponge needs 160g oil (about 175ml) which (based on Sainsbury’s Extra Virgin Olive oil at £11.90 for 2 litres) is around 99p, rather than 200g butter at around £1.51. If you opt for regular vegetable oil, it’ll be even cheaper.

While many of us would rather forget the pandemic, there are a few of those food shortage recipes that make sense again now.

The Italian water cake, an eggless, butter-less cake I wrote about when food shortages first hit in 2020, is soft and tender rather than delicately springy and buttery like a Victoria sponge. But it’s delicious with cream and jam, and uses just flour, sugar, oil and water, plus lemon or orange zest and juice for flavour.

For the time being, though, we are going to be stuck with careful shopping and looking at supermarketshelf edges to find the price per 100g. “Check, check, check,” says Lucas. “I’ve got used to it now.”

On the upside, that homemade sponge is still cheaper than buying one ready-made. Baking – and eating – cake still makes sense.

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2023-06-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

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