Kate Middleton is getting some expert baking tips!
The Princess of Wales received a mini-tutorial in cake making when she and Prince William joined Great British Baking Show finalist Alice Fevronia at a recent party to mark the 75th birthday of the U.K.’s publicly funded National Health Service (NHS).
Kate and William, both 41, helped out at the Big Tea Party hosted by NHS Charities Together by adding some finishing touches to Fevronia’s tiered cake and cupcakes.
Kate also added the topper to the main cake — and had lots of questions about Fevronia’s expert skills in creating the NHS-themed party piece
The princess was actually asking a lot of baking tips, like, ‘How did you get the buttercream so smooth?’ ” Fevronia, who was in the 2019 series of the hit baking show, tells PEOPLE.
“She mentioned that she’d been up quite late on a couple of occasions trying to decorate the kids’ birthday cakes,” she adds.
Princess Kate also wanted to know “about how to get the sides of the cake straight and smooth,” says Fevronia. “I used to be a teacher, so I went into teacher mode. I was like, ‘Right, this is what you need to do.’ ”
“That was quite cool that I got to sort of give her some tips!” she tells PEOPLE.
They were just really fun,” Fevronia continues about the royal couple. “They were just having a fun time.”
Fevronia’s celebratory cake was decorated in the blue and white colors of the NHS and included mini-doctors’ clipboards illustrated with important dates, including the day William’s late mom, Princess Diana, opened the first AIDS ward in the NHS.
The Baking Show alum has many family members who have worked in the NHS, and her partner is a pediatric doctor, working long, stressful hours.
“[The royal couple] were asking. How does he decompress, and how does he relax? And I think it’s making sure that there are people to talk to because it’s such a busy job,” she tells PEOPLE.
NHS Charities Together provides mental health support to NHS employees, and the party for staffers and former patients was held in the wellbeing garden of a London hospital. While the NHS provides free care at the point of need, there has always been some reliance on locally based charities to help fill gaps in the system and give further support to hospitals and medical centers.
One of the key people Kate and William met during their visit was Aneira Thomas, from Swansea, Wales, who was the first baby to be born under the NHS 75 years ago today.
Thomas arrived around a minute after midnight when her mother, Edna, appeared to follow one of the doctors’ pleas to “hold on” in order to become the first baby born in the new health system. “It is central to who I am, and I wanted to shout it from the rooftops,” she tells PEOPLE.
Baker Fevronia adds, “It was such a lovely day. The sun was shining. It was just lovely. There were so many amazing people from the NHS there and so many different jobs or so many different connections to the NHS.”
