Most of our volunteers have a passion for baking and decorating awesome birthday cakes. ​But even if you do not consider yourself a great baker, there is a lot you can do.

Becoming a Volunteer Baker

Can you bake a perfectly acceptable sponge and be creative with some decoration? If so then you can be a baker for Free Cakes For Kids, Bristol. 

How does it work?
When we get an order in, the area coordinator will process the information and send out a virtual sign-up sheet to all of the volunteer bakers, usually with at least 2 weeks notice. The information you get at this stage is usually something really simple e.g. "Peppa Pig cake for 3yo. Delivery to BS3 on 12th December". If you are interested and available, you can sign up.

The area coordinator will then select a baker from those who have offered, and give them the rest of the information (full address, names, contact details) and let the recipient family know the name of their baker. It is then over to the baker to make contact with the family, arrange a suitable delivery time, purchase ingredients, bake and decorate the cake, write up the ingredients information (we have a standard form for this) and deliver the cake to the family (or partner organisation if confidential). 

​Do I have to commit to a certain number of cakes?
We appreciate that being a volunteer takes time and money, we can only thank you for that. As a group we do around 10 cakes a month but we tend to have around 45 bakers on our list at any one time and there's usually at least one person available for each request so it's up to you how often you offer to bake. Where we have multiple bakers sign up, we assign them to whoever baked least recently so it's spread fairly. 

Am I good enough at baking?
Yes! We don't ask that you have amazing skills, just a passion for baking and making a child's birthday a bit more special. ​And it's always up to you which cakes you offer to bake, so if e.g. you think a dinosaur cake is far too hard, no problem - there'll be something another time that you might feel more confident with and can sign up for instead. It's also part of the area coordinator's job to manage expectations of the recipient families so that they are not expecting a professional cake. We also only take requests for a theme or flavour, we would never expect you to match an image off instagram!
Do I need a car?
We do ask that you deliver the cakes yourself, so in an ideal world, yes. However we do have some bakers who do not, and they only sign up for cakes in their local area and deliver them on foot. The area coordinator may be able to help with delivery on occasion (e.g. if you've had last minute car trouble, or no other bakers are available) but please assume that you would generally be delivering yourself. All delivery addresses will be within a BS postcode and you'll always know the first half before you sign up so can decide if it's further than you'd like to travel. ​
What sort of things might I be baking?​
​Have a look at our social media, volunteer area and cake gallery to see what we've been up to. We get requests for anything from chocolate, to princesses, to minecraft, to rainbows and anything inbetween. 
Sounds great, how do I sign up?
​To find out more about being a volunteer baker for us, please contact us at freecakesbristol@gmail.com and Isabelle will get back to you about how everything works and how to sign up. Please note, we require our volunteer bakers to be 18 or older. Please include a couple of photos of cakes you've made in the past - we don't expect any Bake Off showstoppers, we just want to check that you have some past experience in baking and decorating. ​

Not a great baker? We still need you!

We are a community organisation and always interested in ways to improve our service to reach more people. So if you have any ideas and/or skills that you think could help us, please do get in touch email and we can discuss the options.

Other ways you can help include:
  • Donating baking ingredients / equipment
  • Offering to deliver cakes on behalf of bakers
  • Helping us with social media / website management
  • Admin support with carrying requests from order to assigning to a baker
  • Outreach to local support services and finding new groups that we can offer our services to.

Donate money to us (for FREE!!)

You can donate money to us for FREE! I know right.. how does that work?! We’re registered with easyfundraising, which means over 4,000 shops and sites will donate to us for free every time you use easyfundraising to shop with them. These donations will help SO MUCH, so please sign up to support us – it’s completely free and doesn’t take long. Just click the logo below to be taken to our easyfundraising page and set up donations. 

Donations help us with running costs such as the upkeep of this website, allowing us to reach as many people as we can. They also help us to purchase cake boards and boxes so that we can deliver the cakes safely and hygienically. We try to keep a supermarket card topped up for occasions where we are unable to provide a cake (severe allergies, late notice, no bakers available) so your money could directly provide a child with a cake!​