The Whistlow Green bake sale concluded on Saturday after six weeks, having announced its category winners one per week in a sequence of short videos posted to the village social account.

The lemon drizzle class was revealed in week one. The gingerbread class followed. Organisers then paused the announcements for a week to post a video explaining the pause, which drew more comments than any of the announcements.

Judging had in fact been completed on the first afternoon. Mrs Catherine Bellamy, who ran the cake stall, confirmed that all results had been written on a single sheet of paper and placed in a drawer.

"We judged everything in about an hour," she said. "But you can't just tell people. People don't gather for a list. They gather for a moment."

The raffle

The raffle, originally the sale's main fundraiser, was cancelled on Friday. Organisers said the draw could no longer serve its purpose, because the prizes had already been fully experienced by the community.

The ham, the bottle of whisky and the wheel of cheese from the delicatessen were each teased in their own post, photographed from three angles. Residents speculated about who would win them, argued about whether the ham photograph had been staged, and produced reaction videos to a rumour that the whisky was not the good one.

"The prizes did their work," said Mr Douglas Ferreira, chair of the organising committee. "Everybody who wanted to feel something about that ham has felt it. Actually handing it to someone now would close the story, and the story is what people come for."

The prizes will be returned to the donors. The proceeds of the argument, Ferreira said, exceeded what the raffle had raised in any previous year, although he declined to give a figure on the grounds that the number itself would end the discussion about the number.

What happens next

The committee has voted to hold next year's sale entirely without a sale. The plan is to announce a bake sale, post about it for six weeks, and cancel it. Ferreira described the proposal as efficient.

Mrs Bellamy has withdrawn from the committee. She has started a separate account, she said, from which she will bake the cakes anyway and simply give them to people.

"The village asked me why I would hide the cakes from the feed," she said. "I told them the feed can't have them. They looked at me like I'd said something in another language."

Her account has posted once so far. It is a photograph of a cake, in a kitchen, with nobody reacting to it.