Over this weekend, and no doubt next, there were a lot of cake stalls in churches. Most of the cakes are home-made and many of them are of very good quality. Unlike the teas, they tend not to be sold at bargain prices.

It is therefore very irritating to discover that some of them are mass-produced fare taken out of their packets and masqueraing as home-made. It is only a tiny minority and I am sure that most of the churches are unaware of this deception.

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There is nothing wrong with donating supermarket cakes and I am sure that many a hard-pressed working woman has done this. I have absolutely no objection to eating a slice of McVitie's Jamaica Ginger or Tesco's Tarte-au-citron with my cup of tea, but I do object to paying two or three times the supermarket price for a whole cake re-wrapped by some woman too ashamed to admit to the rest of the church ladies that she lacked either the time or the skill to make her own.

The chocolate marble sponge cake looked lovely, but had never been anywhere near a domestic oven and had the unmistakeable taste and texture of improvers and preservatives, unlike the fruit loaf and the coffee and walnut cake both of which are very good indeed.

I don't want to be a grumpy old woman, but I suspect that many of the women unwrapping shop cakes to pass off as their own would be the first to cry fraud if someone soaked the labels off supermarket jam. So non-cooks be brave: leave the packaging on the cake and let the stallholders slice it up for tea, put it in the tombola draw with all the other jars, bottles and packages, or sell it for what it is.