My layer cakes cost me about $2.75 per whole cake (if using cocoa powder, for chocolate buttercream frosting). One cake is enough for dessert for 5 of us, on 3 nights (slim slices of cake). That's about 92 cents per family-dessert.
I get 2 dinner's worth of dessert for 5 of us from a pie. (Again, slim slices of pie, drat those kids had to grow up and eat more! Now my slice of pie had to shrink!) But what does a typical pie cost me to bake?
My pie pastry recipe makes enough pie dough for 5 single crusts. The whole batch costs about $2.15, for my ingredients, so 43 cents per single crust.
If I make rhubarb custard crumb pie (garden rhubarb), my additional ingredients of eggs, sugar, flour and butter cost about 75-85 cents. So, my rhubarb-crumb pie costs as much as $1.30 per pie, or 65 cents per family-dessert.
If I make 2-crust blackberry pie (with free blackberries, they're everywhere, here), I double my cost on the crust to 86 cents, but only add 15 cents of additional ingredients (sugar, flour, salt), for a pie costing $1.01 total, or 51 cents per family-dessert. Apple pies, made with home-grown apples compare similarly to the blackberry.
Pies for which I have to buy filling ingredients (like lemon meringue, banana cream or chocolate cream) can be considerably more expensive to make. Of the store-bought filling choices, lemon meringue comes in at about 80 cents for the filling (using bottled lemon juice and skipping the lemon zest), or $1.23 for a whole pie. A banana cream pie costs about $1.10-1.20 for the banana, whip cream, and scratch-cooked vanilla pudding, or $1.65 to $1.75 including the crust, or almost 90 cents per family-dessert (close to the cost of scratch-baked cake with buttercream icing). And chocolate cream pie is a sheer indulgence, at over $3 per whole pie.
So, my conclusion with this analysis, if I'm counting pennies closely, then a simple pie made with home-grown fruit is most affordable, and more nutritious than cake.
This past week, I was wanting a frugal pie for dessert, meaning no eggs and less sugar. We are now entering rhubarb season. Rhubarb will be my most economical fruit for the next 2 1/2 months. But, "regular" two-crust rhubarb pie does not thrill me. So, I scrounged the freezer and found a few bags of frozen blackberries from last summer's harvest. I used half blackberries, half chopped rhubarb in this pie. I flavored the filling with some orange zest, and used about 2/3 cup sugar, and a pinch of baking soda (to reduce tartness, without adding more sugar), plus some flour for thickening, and a dash of salt. It was delicious, satisfied my hunger for pie, and only cost about $1 for the whole pie.
However, there is 7-minute frosting, which brings the cost of layer cake way down . . .
Hmmm, I may need some more calculations, and a bit of baking and tasting :-) .
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