Get ready for a right royal celebration

Keep it simple, says Juliet Sear, baker on ITV’s This Morning

NOSTALGIA: Easy-to-serve food is great for street parties and celebrations. Think classic sandwiches with old-school fillings – cheese and pickle, salmon and cucumber, or ham and tomato.

HAVE FUN: You need to have fun too, so go for things you’ve made before or are easy to make.

ONE HANDED: Your guests may already be holding a drink, so think what they can eat using one hand, such as sausage rolls, crisps and breadsticks.

MAKE IT

Jubilee traybake FOR THE SPONGE:

□ 300g softened, unsalted butter

□ 300g caster sugar

□ 2tsp vanilla bean paste or extract

□ 6 medium free-range eggs

□ 300g self-raising flour

□ 1tsp baking powder

□ Red and blue food colouring

FOR THE TOPPING:

□ 250g softened, unsalted butter

□ 500g icing sugar

□ 2tsp vanilla bean paste or extract

1 Preheat oven to 190C/170C fan/Gas 5. Cream butter, caster sugar and vanilla until pale and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, until all incorporated.

2 Mix baking powder through the flour and fold into the wet mix.

3 Divide the mix into three and colour 1/3 blue and 1/3 red.

4 Add mix to tin using dessert spoons, making alternate blobs of colour, then drag a knife through to swirl the colours. 5 Bake for 30-35 minutes until golden and risen, and a skewer comes out clean from the middle. Leave to cool for 5 mins then turn out onto a rack to cool completely.

6 Meanwhile, make the buttercream. Add all the butter and 1/3 of the icing sugar to a mixing bowl. Mix slowly until combined.

7 Add vanilla and mix for a minute or so until smooth. Add another 1/3 of the sugar, beat to combine, then add the last 1/3. Beat until pale, fluffy and soft.

8 Keep 350g of it white and colour 300g bright red and 100g blue. Spread white buttercream thinly across the top and mark halfway, lengthways and horizontally, to give you a central cross to base the flag piping on.

9 Pipe two equal-sized blobs of red either side of the line and continue to give you a wide red flag design in both directions.

10 Now pipe up against the edge of this red cross with white buttercream in neat blobs.

11 Pipe red blobs from each corner to meet the centre of the cross, then pipe white blobs up against these four red lines to frame them.

12 Lastly fill the remaining area blue to complete the design.

■ Recipe from Juliet Sear and Silver Spoon sugar