Jean-Paul Hévin: Éclair Caramel Fleur de Sel

No running, but my cough is less wet, so I'll at least try some stretches later. Still, it's the end of the holidays, so I got the other new seasonal cake from Jean-Paul Hévin for this month, Éclair Caramel Fleur de Sel (661 yen), which is as the name implies. This was excellent, despite being an éclair, so I'm warming to this type of dessert, though still not my favorite cake-type treat.

Pierre Hermé: Mille-feuille Plénitude

Decided it was time to go back to the basics with the superb shops that reliably give me great or at least excellent cake. I got the Mille-feuille Plénitude (ミルフィユ プレニチュード; 864) from Pierre Hermé. This is pretty extreme, being a mille-feuille with a fairly thick top layer of caramelized pastry leaves and some lower down, chocolate with fleur de sel (fancy sea salt), two layers (as the main filling) of chocolate mascarpone cheese cream, and caramel-based layer (the word they gives seem to be only used by them, カラメルモワルゥ (karamerumowaruu), but is a kind of caramel gelatin and is fine. It was very good and I appreciated it, but in the end I'm not sure that it was special. Certainly, it's complex and full of good things and the components work together well, so I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt and say excellent. It's pretty expensive, but then there is a lot of it, so it's not unreasonable, even if it is more than I need.

The run was over to the imperial moat course for one lap (5 km). This was not so much a training run in terms of training my body but training for pacing myself on that track, where there are markers every 100 m, but I'm not sure about how accurate they are and I can't read the distance off them like at Meiji Jingu Gaien, so I had to research about where some of the 0.5 km and 1.0 km intervals are relative to where I start. I also tried counting markers as I went, but ended up with one extra one (assuming there are 50). My goal was just +11.0 km/h on the course, which I did, and my run there seemed to be similar, but going back was slower and I was only around 10 km/h. I'm near my current running budget limit, and will remain so through the weekend, it looks like. Currently that means about 69 km/week at 12 km/h (my actual raw distance is now 72.2 km and should break 75 km tomorrow, as I replace last Saturday's fairly fast intervals by a leisurely run down to Hiroo area). Sunday's plan is slightly less than last week, 28 km, which will let me do reconnaissance on two shops for future cake comparisons (maybe in two weeks) and then bring me back paste Octobre to try a new shop (for me) that's not available on a weekday.

Pierre Hermé: Flocon Plénitude

Yesterday's run was boringly like the previous day's: laps around Meiji Gingu Gaien at 11 km/h, just I did a fourth lap (5.3 km total), plus kept the speed up going home, but was a little slower coming. 

The cake (bought today) was from Pierre Hermé at Isetan, the Flocon Plénitude (フロコン プレニチュード ["plenitude of flakes"]; 864 yen). This is pretty complicated, supposedly: a chocolate macaron, chocolate ganache with chocolate in it, chocolate with fleur de sel (a kind of salt) in it, and chocolate mousse. It is a rich chocolate cake and everything harmonized well, except the dryness of the macaron (?) wasn't really working for me, as texture. Maybe if I had known what it was (I found the description online later), I would have appreciated it at the time. I was worried that I am overly biased toward chocolate, but I realize that I'm also critical of chocolate cake that doesn't live up to what I think is the best I've had, so I suppose those factors balance out. This was definitely a good cake, but not something I need again and so hard to recommend at the price. I would like something more exceptional than design from the half dozen shops that I am designating "superb". Of course, I already knew that holiday cakes made for shape rarely are great, so maybe I should have chosen differently, but the description is sufficient interesting, now that I've had a chance to read it, it still seems like the logical choice, so no regrets, except that the photo came out blurry.