When they closed the Wonder hostess bread thrift store near our house a few years ago I had to come up with a plan to save money on school snacks and more. Today was my father's birthday so we decided to take a nice ride. I could not believe that we found one of these stores on our ride. I was immediately brought back to the days when my children were going to school. As we walked in, and long before we got to the bread aisle there were cupcakes, devil dogs , mini coffee cakes and more.
The best thing I liked about these and still do is that they are individually wrapped . But when my children were small we had to be frugal with our snacks , and to be able to quickly leave in the morning chaos . If not we risked not being on time . So, every Sunday afternoon we baked and cooked for our lunch desserts , snacks and breakfast items for the kids as well as Poppie. We baked 2 boxes of cupcakes , one chocolate , one yellow, We seemed to end up with about 45 cupcakes . We put these on the table to cool . Next was a package of brownies which after cooking we also cooled these on the table. We would go to the store and get bagels, not a bakery but a grocery store where they are cheaper. Sometimes they are on sale and then they are even a better deal.
If we had extra time we even made a few batches of chocolate chip cookies. After the cupcakes cooled we frosted them. Then we let them sit a little while longer to harden the frosting before freezing. The brownies were cut into pieces and put into small plastic sandwich bags that have zippered seals. The bagels are sliced and wrapped also one by one and put into a larger zippered plastic bag. Just about now the cookies were just about ready to be wrapped. Depending how big they were baked ,you would put 2 or 3 in each bag to freeze.
When the cupcakes are ready they are also put into sandwich size bags to freeze. I used to keep one section of the freezer for Sunday baking for 2 reasons. One reason was so that the baked goods , especially the cupcakes would not be crushed. The other was so that everyone knew where they were and did not have to go rummaging through the freezer. They were able to just grab and go, and by lunch or early snack time they were defrosted and fresh.
The cake mixes and the brownies were about a $1.00 a box, The cookies were about $4.00 for the chips and flour , the bagels are about $3.50 to $6.00 a dozen. So we have a total counting items on hand such as extra flour and eggs, the bags and more of about $12.00 to bake. We figured for each snack they are about $ .75 each if they are store bought .After we were done we had made about 100 snacks. Even I was surprised that they cost about $.12 each. That is a savings of at least $.63 each. What a huge savings for just an afternoon of family fun baking together. The memories are priceless.
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