Back to beautiful Bude

This summer was my third time visiting Bude. It’s such a beautiful Cornish seaside town. The scenery is stunning, the sea is easy to get to and the people are wonderfully welcoming. Bude also holds a very special place in my heart for reasons that I’ll get to in a minute.

But first, Bude food.

I’m always keen to seek out the best and preferably most authentic places to get my mitts on some delicious foods, so before going anywhere, I tend to do a bit of research. It would also be criminal to visit Cornwall and not have a pasty or a cream tea.

Pengenna Pasties

They don’t call them Cornish pasties down there, obviously, just pasties. And what could be finer, delicious steak, potato, swede, onion and black pepper encased in flaky pastry. Pengenna has three shops: Bude, St Ives and Tintagel, and they make and sell between 300-700 traditional pasties every day in the Bude shop.

They also have a small cafe within the bakery if you prefer to sit in. You might even see them preparing and hand-crimping the pasties. It was a joy to watch, she looked as though she could have done it with her eyes closed, her hands knowing what to do intuitively.

The large pasties are LARGE and very filling, but really, really good and had that beautiful bit of slightly caramelised pastry around the bottom where the meat juices had leaked out.

The Barge for Cream Tea

I’m going to put it straight out there, but jam first on your scone is just wrong, wrong, wrong. They do it right in Devon with the clotted cream layer down first. But as they say, when in Rome or when in Cornwall, so I persevered with the jam on first.

The Barge is moored on the canal near The Castle and serves lunches and afternoon or cream teas, with scones baked fresh daily. We had cream teas all round, served with sweet strawberry jam, Rhodda’s clotted cream and a pot of tea or coffee.

The scones were delicious, almost shortbread-like in texture on the edges, then soft and crumbly in the middle (making it difficult to spread the jam first, but I’ll forgive them).

For the record, I say scone as in gone, not scone as in cone, but let’s not go there!

La Bocca Pizza Kitchen

Not very traditionally Cornish, I’d agree, but definitely worth a mention. La Bocca is a small pizzeria on The Strand in Bude. When we went it was exceptionally busy and they were turning tables away. Victims of their own success. We were lucky to grab one of the last tables outside (brrrr) on the promise of moving inside as soon as a table was free.

The pizzas are prepared and cooked in their open kitchen for half a dozen or so tables, set up as simple seating and a bench-bar area.

The pizzas ranged from simple Margheritas up to more adventurous toppings. The bases of the pizzas were the showstopper for me. The bread was so good. The right level of chewy, crispy and risen around the edges. The toppings were tasty and plentiful. I had the Calabrese which had aubergines, courgettes, mozzarella and ‘nduja. I have never seen so much ‘nduja on a pizza and it was so spicy too. Worth noting that they also do takeaways.

What makes Bude so special

Aside from the scenery, being close to the sea and the intrinsic surf culture, Bude is special for me because it’s where I got married. Just me and him, plus our two kids in a covert ceremony in the town hall, the Parkhouse Centre. Minimal planning and minimal fuss, dressed in jeans and flipflops, with two ladies hijacked from the embroidery group to be our witnesses, we tied the knot on holiday in 2008.

That was the last time before this that we’d been to Bude, so we decided to pop back to the town hall to show the kids where it all happened as they didn’t really remember the day. Definitely not Millie anyway, as she was only a few months old at the time.

We should have left it as it was, a misty memory of our special day as the Parkhouse Centre sadly no longer does weddings. Apparently, the nearby and simply stunning Castle Bude is a much-prefered venue for a civil ceremony. Still, we felt compelled to take one last look at the room where we exchanged our vows those years previously.

What a disappointment. The room where I and he became we, is now just a plain old conference room complete with AV equipment and not the beautiful flower-laden venue that I remember. It’s safe to say that some doors are best left unopened.

This is my sixth helping of the #Write52 challenge. One post each week for a whole year. To read more from us, search ‘Write52’ on Twitter.