It couldn’t have been more than a month into my son’s first year of school when we got the notice about a bake sale. The class would be holding a fundraiser in the front hall starting at 8:30 a.m. Would we bring in our homemade baked goods to raise money for classroom supplies and field trips? Volunteers welcome. No nuts, please.

Remembering the dedicated ladies of my hometown church bazaars, with their miniature glazed strawberry tarts, coconut and lemon squares, brownies, butter tarts, cheese balls, shortbread and fruitcake—acres and acres of green-and-red-cherry-flecked, dense-as-a-brick fruitcake—I felt a tidal wave of panic crushing my chest. How would I ever find the time, energy and skill to make something worthy of a bake sale? Though I have always liked baking, a cavalier approach to measuring and following recipes has, over the years, yielded mixed results. I nervously flipped through my many shelves of cookbooks—each of them with a higgledy-piggledy annex of pages torn from magazines—looking for some­thing spectacular, something no one would pass up, something that would bring in the funds necessary to get my four-year-old and his classmates col­oured pencils and Podge, maybe even admittance to the Gardiner Museum. I settled on my fail-safe chocolate chip cookie recipe. Not too thick, nicely chewy, loaded with morsels of milk chocolate goodness and, if nothing else, nut-free.

Still, I did it with a slightly heavy heart, certain I was falling far short of the church bazaar standard I’d witnessed as a child. The women of my home­town’s many congregations would go all out for their annual fundraisers. There was the obligatory tea—cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches on Wonder Bread served with Red Rose in bone china cups. At the white elephant and craft sale, crocheted covers that disguised unsightly toilet paper rolls were sold alongside the once-ubiquitous, now-extinct Lifesavers clown, a half-candy, half-yarn concoction with a Styrofoam head and ghoulish grin.

But it was the baked goods table that, for me, inspired the most awe. The offerings were not just legion, but also astonishingly well-wrapped: squares, bars and cookies were arrayed on Royal Chinet plates or Styro­foam trays, then mummified in plastic wrap, the price and a terse description (“pecan,” “lemon”) written on masking tape on the outside. Indeed, the madeleine may have cast Proust back to his youth, but it is the nanaimo bar—that tooth- achingly sweet layering of choco­late, bright yellow custard, coco­nut and butter—that does the trick for me. It seems the perfect, over-the-top symbol of the excesses of the late ’70s and ’80s.

Actually, if you’d asked me before my son started kindergar­ten, I would have said that the bake sale was one of those pheno­mena that vanished along with home perms and the Bay City Rollers. But like so many things I’ve rediscovered since having children (the public library, Saturday mornings), it didn’t go away at all.

In fact, the bake sale has simply changed with the times. In Toronto, where public education and resources for such “extras” as art, music and field trips have been cut to the quick and teachers are forced to pay out of their own pocket for classroom supplies, it’s pretty much obligatory. (There are even political bake sales these days, though admittedly “Bake Back the White House” hasn’t had a noticeable impact on George Bush’s reign.) Children have changed, too. Modern kids, I have learned, have no time for fruitcake and won’t touch a lemon cheesecake square. Instead, it’s all about cupcakes drowned in sprinkles, cookies studded with candy-coated chocolate and cakes in the shape of sponges in square pants.