Clair de Lune, Criollo

Wednesday, I finally went to P. Clair de Lune for cake agine. I have them down as an excellent shop, but my my metrics they rate over the supposedly quite excellent shop L'Abricotier. However, I've had twice as many cakes from L'Abricotier, so I've had to dig deeper in their line-up, making it a not very fair comparison in terms of selection bias. To compensate, rather than swapping them between the two groups immediately, like I've done in the past, now that I should have one more cake from quite excellent shops, I instead got one from P. Clair de Lune, as a substitute. It's complicated, so fortunately I'm currently not doing this for any other pair of shops.

The short course there is over 8 kilometers, though I missed a turn, so maybe it reached 8.5 km. However, I realized why I usually don't take that course (not the missed turn; I should be used to turning there by now), which is it goes right past the JR station, making it much too crowded for running for a relatively long stretch. So actually my mistake would have been correct if I had followed the course I tried on the way back, if only I had known. Total was probably around 17 km, which I did in 110 minutes, faster than I expected given my foot problems. Also, my stretching and icing in the evening was apparently very effective, as I had surprisingly little trouble in the morning. I'll try to repeat today.

The cake was Criollo, which was chocolate cake with the criollo variety of Venezuelan chocolate, supposedly the best and most expensive. I've become jaded with chocolate cake, but I ate this in and exchanged a few words with the propriety, so I would feel guilty rating it poorly, but I think excellent is a reasonable, honest rating. An important point was the pink pepper on top, for accent, but it is still mostly just straight, excellent, chocolate.

Google says they also have a shop in the Marui at Ueno Station, which is slightly more convenient. That one is confirmed on the shop's website (which I also had not known about), but it also says there's one where Google Streetview shows a hotel. Next time I run by either (which would probably only be to go to the main shop), I should check out what they are selling, since the Marui branch might not have the fresh cake.