Frédéric Cassel, Mille-Feuille Caramel Pomme

Still catching up, Sunday I went out reasonably early to do a one-way neighborhood course run. I had just found a neglected area, Roppongi 7, which is just across southwest from Tokyo Midtown, so relatively close. I had missed the crosswalk down near the National Art Center, Tokyo. There is not a whole lot there, but they have a park, a cake shop, a bakery, a shrine, a couple temples, and a couple shrines in a compact area. It's possible to cross over to the northeast end of Nishiazabu, but I can't find any sites there that I would visit.

From there, I left the course and went exploring for future runs.  On the way, I stopped for a pasty at Maison Landemaine. I went to the location at Azubudai, across from the southeast end of the Akasaka-Azabudai-Roppongi-Toranomon loop, there should be one already on that loop, further north that I haven't visted yet. I got their Kouign Amann, which was ribons of pastry folded into the usual hockey puck shape, with a hard caramelized layer on top. Very fancy, and good, but did not really work for me. In generally, their pastries are pretty expensive.

For future runs, first I went over to finish photographing sites on the Shibakouen--Toranomon west and east loops, and then moved on to Atago and Toranomon. These are all going to be small loops, since this is a really urban area surrounded by main streets, though there are enough pedestrian bridges and crosswalks without signals to get me just south of Hibiya Park to the north. To get east, I'll have to go south through Shiba Park, though it can't really advance very far, so this branch is going to come to and end unless I can turn south.

There was cake, but I screwed up sort of (I checked my list, but a hyphen through off my alphabetization) and got a repeat, Mille-feuille Caramel Pomme. Last time I rated it good, which is understandable, but this time I was more in a mille-feuille mood and would call it excellent, so I didn't mind the mistake so much.

Monday, I took a rest from running and cake, but went to Isetan and visited Hediards and got their Domestic Wheat Kouign Amann (if I've got the name right), which was a more conventional version, which I thought was excellent.

Long run to Frédéric Cassel for Mille-Feuille Caramel Pomme

Took the Shinjuku History and Culture course from the beginning of the Gaien Walk to as far as Akasaka Mitsuke along the Outer Moat Walk. I noticed that the on-site guide marker map indicates the Outer Moat Walk should climb up to the footpath parallel to the road after St. Ignatius Catholic Church, so I did. Also, running on the north side in front of Hotel New Otani causes a lot of delay from the stop lights, so I finally switched to the south side. Both changes made to the map. From there, I ran to cross Inner Moat Road and then did the imperial moat course one full lap and then to Hibiya. There was a running event of some kind going on, so people were standing with signs at the kilometer mark points (I joined just before the 4 kilometer point and the woman of the couple in front of me was surprised that the person holding the sign and cheering people to not give up was her mother), though it was only obvious that a few people were obviously participating (beyond the few hundred at the start/end point). Rather than go all the way to Ginza running, I decided to just stop at Hibiya and take the subway tunnels to Ginza Mitsukoshi (which is about 700 m).

The cake was the Mille-Feuille Caramel Pomme (ミルフィユキャラメルポム, 864 yen), which is a fairly normal mille-feuille with a layer of apple in the middle and some caramel taste. It was definitely good, but I can't call it excellent: I'm not interested in having it again, and also I didn't appreciate that the apple was surrounded by layers of sponge cake. In mile-feuille? There might be structural reasons why it could not have been surrounded by mille-feuille (puff) pastry, for example, or caramelized almond slices, which I would like, since keeping the layers from sliding was obviously an issue, but it just seemed wrong to me, even though it was too thin really to affect the texture much more than the apple already did.

Took the short route back to Lawson 100. Total, I ran 16.4 km, all three parts averaging 9 km/h. I'm feeling good. Maybe this week, I'll finally use up my budget enough to expand it for the first time in three weeks. It's going to get colder tomorrow, but I'd like to get over to Viron, with a backup in Tokyu Plaza (Ginza), which will be another 11 km, so I'll only have 6 km left for Friday night, so I'll probably go to Tokyo Midtown, not find anything new, and come back and eat homemade canele or macarons, which I'll be doing Saturday anyway, since I plan to get this year's flu shot.