St Ives French Market

This weekend was the first in a while where I didn't have a million things to do and a million places to go. I had no cake orders or specific meals to cook. It was one of those brilliant weekends where you could just do exactly what you wanted, which was great! But of course I couldn't leave the food and baking side out of my weekend too much...or at all really as you saw that Saturday was pretty much taken up by the croquembouche! I thought I would go with huge photos so you can see everything in it's ultimate glory!

Me and my mum decided to have a girly day as we hadn't been able to have one in ages. We noticed that the French market was in town and shockingly, after all the time I have lived here I have never actually been to one when it's bee here, which is crazy! So as Saturday morning was free we decided to check it out. While it was good, it's a fraction of the size it used to be and the town would be filled with French cars, it's a shame it's decreased so much but all the best bits were there as far as I'm concerned, e.g bread and cheese!

You can't got to a market like this without picking up some bread, a lot of it was baked right in front of you which was brilliant when you knew you could pick up a fresh and even warm loaf. There were so many to choose from. I've been on a bit of a bread detox so it was nice to be able to buy some good quality stuff to fall off the wagon with. We chose a loaf of corn bread as you can see below. I've never had a loaf like this before and it was actually quite sweet tasting, I would never have thought to put corn in bread but it was delicious!

Now the cheese, I never used to like cheese, crazy right? I did when I was little but not when I was growing up. This was until I went to University and I fell in love with it. Brie in particular after having it baked one time. I think I could easily just live on brie...it's just such a shame it's so bad for you and in my books - the riper the better! We managed to pick up these three for only £5 - one brie, one camembert and one which is a mix of the both (apparently). So trying to be good we put two in the freezer for using at christmas and the third...the brie...well, it didn't last long. We literally cut up all of the bread in fancy slantly slices, sliced/spooned the brie onto them and grilled them until melty perfection - and feasted! Nom! It was good to fall of the healthy wagon for a day (don't worry I'll never stop baking, I try to eat healthy so I can eat more cake! )

OK we bought one last thing...it's an odd choice because it wasn't French, it was from an Italian stall! They had all of these slices of chocolate there that we initially thought were cake, but no - chocolate! All with gorgeous flavours like Amaretto, coffee and orange, which is the one that we bought - only one slice though as they looked quite heavy.  The texture was very odd, not hard like chocolate but more like set ganache which was actually lovely and this too didn't see the end of the weekend.

Now that I know what stunning finds I can get at markets like these I'll be sure to check out the farmers one that comes into town now and then especially with the countdown to Christmas starting it'll be time to stock up!

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