Only yesterday, on a necessary trip for food, I did neighborhood course run down through western Minami-Aoyama down to Roppongi. Coming back, I stopped for my first pastry from Nino Caffe, across the main north-south street from Nogi Park. They had various fillings, and plain, but I went with the chocolate. Note sure how they were naming this, so I'll call it a just Chocolate Croissant. The croissant is pretty soft and holds a lot of filling, which seems to be chocolate custard. Very rich and good, but of of course, not so sophisticated. It was too messy to each on the way, so I saved it for home, even though I was also carrying cake and still needed to stop at a grocery (where the shelves were pretty bare, so I just got bananas, which I was running low on).
The main event, of course, was the cake-off, though that required another trip, this time down to Shibuya through Jinguumae, where I found that Yatsudoki had built a shop deep in on a street not on the running course. In the end, adding it led to merging three loops, so I'm back to having one big loop south of Omote-Sandou Road to match the one north, for the main strip between Harajuku Stn. and Omote-Sandou Stn. That's turned this clump of loops (which include a new one using the remaining bridge over Meiji-Doori to get to a little loop under Yamanote Line that has a coffee shop and a convenience store. Under current conditions, Shibuya Scramble Square had almost no customers, so social distancing was possible.
Today's match up was a first-round cake-off between two recent picks, and I'm still a little tentative about both, but they both are great simple cakes, chocolate mousse cake in the form of Pierre Gagnaire's Mousse au Chocolat et Yuzu and meringue mont-blanc in En Vedette's Mont-Blanc. I'm giving this one to the mousse cake, because it manages to give a real dark chocolate taste to mousse and cutting it with yuzu so it doesn't wear out it's welcome. En Vedette should get a remain yet, as their Roche also has one win.
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