Let's have another food and incarceration post! Cake and a jail break! Let's spring 'em out! (I promise you this will be the final post I write making my almost non-existent connections between food and gaol! And finding lots of different words for jail, prison, the big house, clink, lock up, chokey, correctional facility, slammer, and bastille. Pretty sure there are many, many more, but I won't encourage me…)
La petite bastille
Why another prison themed post? I don't hear you asking. Good question. Well, quite by coincidence, after JH commented last week she thought I was going to mention La Petite Bastille here in Quebec City, we happened to be wandering past the prison, turned hostel, turned gallery earlier this week. No, really!
We weren't trying to break anyone out, or break in, and avoided any of the "file in a baked cake" sort of escapade. I do wonder about that. The file in a cake - has that ever really happened, and how would it go? It got me thinking as we walked around the outside of the building, what sort of cake would work best? A light Victoria sponge doesn't seem much use - the file would fall out, be discovered too soon. Perhaps a heavy chocolate cake? I can see the problem with a tasty chocolate cake (said no one, ever) - if the guards are easily bribed or the sort to turn a blind eye to a file in a cake, wouldn't they also be the sort to eat a delicious chocolate cake meant for an inmate? No cake reaches the inmate, so no file, and no escape! Nope, not a chocolate cake, then.
It's in the bag…(shhh)
My grandmother made a bread pudding so dense you could easily hide a file in there. And a length of rope attached to a grappling iron, a couple of crowbars and even the keys to the getaway vehicle parked under the wall. Maybe even the getaway vehicle itself. I'm telling you, it was a dense dessert. Would probably take days for an entire prison wing plus the guards to eat enough to finally find the file - honestly, it was that heavy. You'd be so tired after chomping through all that bread pudding you'd need a nap, then probably forget you'd even intended to break out. Just writing about that pudding has made me forget why we're talking about it. Oh yes, prison break cakes! If anyone has any suggestions, or a recipe to share, please feel free to do so below. This post isn't going quite where I'd intended…
It was definitely a spring day
La Petite Bastille is now part of La Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec, but currently closed and undergoing refurbishment. So no old prison visit for us, and instead we viewed the "Generations" display on at MNBAQ, our last of what has been several visits to view this collection. We've loved visiting this one! Instead of trying and failing to summarize it, I'll borrow from the MNBAQ descriptor and post a link. "In addition to presenting the works of several artists rarely seen in Québec City, Generations: The Sobey Family and Canadian Art thus offers a genuine panorama of Canadian creativity past and present, reflected both in tormented landscapes and abstractions, and in personal narratives and striking revisions of Canadian history." The exhibition is on until mid May…Generations
Behind the museum
Predictably enough, my favourite paintings in this collection were by Tom Thomson. I have his canoe at home. Oh, ok, a postcard on my desk:
Fingers crossed we'll be out somewhere similar sometime soon!
From prisons to cakes to paintings, I seem to have drifted off, like a birchbark canoe caught on a gentle early summer breeze. Perhaps a good enough time to stop all this vaguely (un)connected nonsense?
Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
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