UNION JACK CAKE (Serves 20-22)

INGREDIENTS:

For the sponge: 600g unsalted butter, softened; 600g caster sugar; 12 medium free range eggs; 600g self-raising flour; 2tsp baking powder; ½tsp fine sea salt For the buttercream: 400g unsalted butter, softened at room temperature; 800g icing sugar; 3tsp vanilla bean paste or extract

For the filling: 300g strawberry or raspberry jam (optional)

Colouring the buttercream: You’ll need to tint some icing for the flag. Keep about 350g white and colour 300g bright red and 100g blue. Use gel food colourings to colour the icing. Bright colours like royal blue will work well.

METHOD:

1. To make the cake, preheat the oven to 190ºc/170ºc fan/gas mark 5. Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla until very light, pale and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time until all incorporated.

2. Dry whisk the baking powder through the flour and fold into the wet mix on slow in increments of three making sure it’s gently mixed through

3. Divide equally between each tin, using a palette knife to level the service.

4. Bake for about 30-35 minutes until going golden and risen and a cake tester or skewer comes out clean from the middle of the sponge. Leave to cool in the tin for five minutes then turn out onto a rack to cool completely.

5. To make the buttercream: add a third of the icing sugar and all the butter to a stand mixer bowl or do with an electric whisk or by hand. Mix on slow until all the sugar is combined into the butter and add the vanilla. Beat on medium speed for a minute or so until smooth, then add the remaining sugar in two parts in the same way. Beat until pale, fluffy and soft. Set aside 450g of the buttercream for the filling.

6. Place the first layer of cake on to a large rectangle board, tray or serving platter and spread over with the jam (if using) and the reserved 450g of buttercream for the filling. Spread over the entire cake, leaving a little border around the edge of the cake so the buttercream does not spill out when placing the second cake on top.

7. Add the second layer of cake to sandwich the filling. It’s best to turn the sponge upside down and have the smooth side that was in the base of the tin uppermost, it will give you a neater finish.

8. To decorate: Now is a good time to take a look at a picture of a Union Jack flag to follow the design (it helped me).

9. Spread over the remaining white buttercream (flag design quantities) thinly to cover the top of the cake. Mark halfway lengthways and horizontally to give you a central cross to base the flag piping from. Begin by piping two equalsized blobs of red either side of the mark and continuing along to build up the lines to give you a wide red flag design across both ways.

10. Now pipe up against the edge of this red cross with the white buttercream in neat blobs to outline it all the way up and down.

11. Pipe with the red blobs from each corner to meet the centre of the cross.

12. Pipe white blobs a little smaller by using less pressure up against these four red lines to frame them.

13. Lastly, using little blobs, fill the remaining sponge area blue to complete the design.

14. Serve and enjoy!