We make no bones about this, we are very proud to be British! This year marked The Queen’s 90th Birthday which was cause for celebration. Also, Team GB did amazingly well at the Olympics.  If we gloss over the mess that is politics it is a good year to be a Brit! With a patriotic spring in our step, we decided to celebrate with British tea party!

Traditionally tea would include sandwiches and scones, but we decided to head straight for the good stuff, cake! We made a Victoria Sponge with blackberry and blueberry jam. Our second cake was a batch of lemon and poppy seed mini bundt cakes (using this awesome Nordic Ware cake tin). Finishing off our trio of cakes was the Hummingbird Bakery recipe for Strawberry Cheesecake cupcakes.

To set the table we used a mix match of red white and blue crockery. Our blue crockery is the willow pattern, we found a set at a charity shop and we love them. (The white plates are the Arv series from Ikea and the red plates are part of the Bosa range from Argos in case you were interested?).  We have some lovely willow pattern cups and saucers, and we borrowed Rich mum’s teapot and cake stand in all their old-school glory.

We found a collection of red, white and blue lanterns, a selection of vases and used some little rose posies to decorate further. Lastly, we added in some union flag bunting. Because it can’t be a British celebration without bunting. It is the law or something.

We had a lovely sunny afternoon to enjoy our patriotic British Tea Party.  We almost felt like belting out a verse or two of Rule Britania but managed to rein ourselves in. That can wait for Last night of the Proms next week