Are there annual events in your local area that you look forward to year after year? A particular market, festival or fair that gets marked in the calendar well in advance? For me it’s the Christchurch Food Festival. For two weekends and the week in between, Christchurch gets taken over by markets, stalls, cookery demonstrations and events at local eateries all in celebration of local food. I was somewhat disappointed when I discovered we’d booked our holiday to be away for the opening weekend, and more disappointed when I discovered that the street market wouldn’t be on for the second weekend – sampling all of the yummy foods cooked fresh on the street is the highlight of the event. Instead, the second weekend was dedicated to baking, and cakes. As I am quite the cake fan this somewhat took the dent out my disappointment but sadly when we got up on Sunday and got ready to go, it started absolutely pouring down. We braved the rain to see what was on offer. A slightly gloomy looking helter skelter stood tall above the fair…
We warmed up with hog roast baps and drinks from the Hop On Inn – a double decker bus converted into a bar. I decided that there could be nothing more British than drinking a Pimms in the pouring rain!
Of course the main event was the cakes. As part of the Bake Weekend there’d been a competition with different categories and age brackets. These cookie monster cupcakes were highly commended in the under-16 category and I thought they were brilliant.
This was the overall winner. Isn’t it amazing? Just… wow!
Tom wanted to eat all of the cakes in the competition so we went next door and treated ourselves to some that were actually for sale. We headed straight to the Fox’s Cupcake Co stall; they’re a regular at the food festival and their cakes are always amazing. I went for Oreo and Tom went for Mint Choc Chip. Don’t they look divine?
We didn’t stay much longer as it really did start pouring down. We visited a friend for a cup of tea and then we might have gone to Waitrose for more snacks and treats – I always think once you’ve crammed a few naughty things in you may as well continue in the same vein! 🙂 By the way, Hannah at Baileycakes took some amazing photos of the first weekend whilst I was away, so if you want to see those go here.
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