A slice of wedding cake from the Queen's nuptials in 1947 is up for sale - but potential buyers have been warned it's no longer edible.
The perfectly preserved piece of fruit cake, which comes in its original presentation box, will be sold at auction.
The slice is one of 2,000 pieces given to guests at Buckingham Palace after the wedding ceremony of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip at Westminster Abbey on November 20, 1947.
It is being auctioned with a guide price of £200-400 next month in Cambridgeshire and comes after the historic Jubilee celebrations last week.
The wedding cake was nine-foot-tall in its entirety and included dried fruit from Australia and preserved with rum and brandy from South Africa.
It was intricately decorated with armorial bearings of the Princess and Lieutenant Mountbatten and depicts scenes from their lives on the bottom two tiers.
The cake was the masterpiece of Fredrick Schur, chief confectioner at McVitie and Price Ltd.
This slice was given to the Queen's caterer Sir Norman Joseph, who organised catering for around 100 Royal Garden parties at Buckingham Palace for over 25 years.
Sir Norman was made Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1969 in recognition of his services to the royal household.
The cake comes in an original presentation box, marked with the wedding date, and is wrapped in cellophane.
Auction house Cheffins, which is selling the cake slice on July 14, has warned the fruit cake is no longer edible.
It was recreated in 2017 to mark the Queen and Prince Phillip's 70th wedding anniversary.
Patisserie chefs at London's famous Le Cordon Bleu spent months baking, crafting, piping and constructing the 9ft-tall, 500lb masterpiece. It was four-tiered, decorated with intricate detail and frilly bits, and topped with white roses.
The cake featured in ITV documentary A Very Royal Wedding , which charted the ceremony in all its grandeur – and looked into how Britain pulled off such a wedding just two years after World War II, which left the country battered.
Rationing – then still in place – didn't apply to the royal cake, which contained, both in 1947 and in its modern reincarnation, nearly 700 eggs and almost four gallons of rum.
Into specially designed tins went 60lb of butter, 55lb of sugar, 75lb of flour, 660 eggs, 80 oranges and lemons, 300lb of dried nuts and fruits, and three-and-a-half gallons of Navy rum; 150lb of marzipan and 110lb of icing sugar was used in the white royal icing.
