(Saturday) Octobre: Tarte Caramel

Used a Saturday run to buy a second cake at Octobre. Last time, I got lost coming back, so I tried a different, more directly but more back-street route, which turned out to be much easier to follow. Going back, I varied it a little bit at first to make sure something Google listed as a "Patisserie" along the way was not interesting (sign out front said rollcake and pudding, so no, not interesting), and then where the route meets up with Asterique and Bien-etre (familiar territory), I explored further back-street routes, which didn't automatically get me the best path (I hadn't researched ahead of time), but I came back an old familiar route rather than relying on Yamanote Avenue and made other slight modification that made it 400 meters longer. As planned, out was 11 km/h and back was 10 km/ for a total between 16 and 17 km.

The cake this time was Tarte Caramel (486 yen), which turned out to be a custard tart on the bottom and I'm not sure what on the top, though caramel was involved. Perhaps there was caramel mousse inside a gelatin layer of caramel, but there was not a lot of flavor anywhere in this tart, so this was just okay and I probably won't need to get there be back soon expect for the "Vostock". Note sure why the photo came out blurry again. I think I need to reset the zoom, as it's not working well with the auto-focus.

I'm late blogging because I went through and re-evaluated my top cape shops to try to get a handle on where I need to go. I had already noticed that I was neglecting some, so I decided that I needed to force them into specific size categories to organize them, or at least the top 30 or so.

The results are as follows, although it's going to be a while before I both to update the map to fully reflect this, and there will be some changes by then.

The top (supreme) shop is Jean-Paul Hévin, of course. Even if they don't have any new cakes, I'd like to get back there for either chocolat chaud or macarons.

The remaining top 3 (quite superb) shops are Dalloyau and Henri le Roux. After the below priorities, I should try another cake from Dalloyau. Henri le Roux I'm probably okay with, as I've tried a lot of their caramel's and chocolates, which are usually excellent but not on the level of great cake.

The remaining top 7 (superb) shops are Frédéric Cassel, Paris S'éveille, Pierre Hermé, and Sadaharu Aoki; these are the ones that I've over-focused on lately.

The remaining top 15 (quite excellent) shops are L'Abricotier, Au Bon Vieux Temps, Del'Immo, Limevert, Ryoco, Ryoura, Viron, and Yu Sasage. In the same class as a bakery is Le Petit Mec, which, along with Del'Immo, Limever, and Ryoura, I have not given enough attention lately.

I'm still working out the remaining top 31 (excellent) shops (I'm 2 shops over), although I've decided that Morozoff deserves to be treated as a real cake shop and visited again and of course I want to get back to Il Pleut sur la Seine again for a second cake (as least as far as this blog is concerned).

Octobre: Gateau Marron

Today was a long reconnaissance run for finding availability of two great cakes for comparison. I started by going down to Origines Cacao, though I had to be careful to avoid the Shinjuku Half Marathon, which was this morning. Fortunately, they take a bridge over Gaiennishidori (Outer Garden West Avenue), and I could escape them, although there is also a pedestrian bridge over the same road that they are on further west that would work, but I was already more west then I wanted for getting to Jiyugaoka via Aoyama Avenue while avoiding the Shibuya Station area. It was about 11 km, which I did in just under 1 h. The rest (about 17 km) today was 10 km/h average.

As it turned out, Origines Cacao not only did not have my target great cake (Martinique), they did not have any of the other three great cakes from there that I'll eventually want to do a comparison with. I'll have to check in with them in a month. Fortunately, there are a lot of things around there of interest to take me to that area. If I had been thinking more ahead, I would have also checked in at Dalloyau (I know they don't have Opale, from asking at the main shop in Ginza, but I didn't ask about any other ones, and by going early, everything would presumable be out, so I don't have to ask). I did think of check Paris S'éveille, but mainly because I wanted to get a pastry there. They had 4 of 6 great cakes out, with the other two definitely being summery. As a snack/fuel, I got Pain Chocolat (under 300 yen), which was great. It's actually really big, because there's a lot of air, and croissant buttery. It's very messy though, of course, because of the layers breaking off, and the chocolate was all along one side and I made the mistake of starting on the other side.

Even though my base cake for comparison turned out not to be available, I still tried to stick to my original plan to run to Bigarreaux, since they have a couple great cakes that I'll eventually want to compare to something, but I forgot one of the turns and overshot the shop in the direction toward my next goal, so I decided to just keep going to Octobre rather than double back. This was my first cake from them, so I picked up their card and noticed that they've crossed out 20:00 as the closing time and written in 19:00, so mistaking their closing time the other night was not so unreasonable. Since it was the recommended cake, I got the Gateau Marron (ガトーマロン; 496 yen), which, as advertised, is a very dense chestnut cake, "almost chestnut paste", the card said, although the inside is definitely dense cake (like pound cake) and the outside of the dome, which is fairly thick (maybe 1 cm in places, so it might have been about half the cake) is fairly solid somewhat hard, toward being crystalline or a hard frosting. It was not overly sweet and it was not a strong chestnut flavor, which was good for me, and I thought it was excellent enough that I should try a second cake to see whether this is really a potentially excellent shop. Not sure when I'll get a chance to get out there again, though, as I'm busy this weekend.

The next great cake to try to compare in the list is Aigre-Douce Fraicheur Framboise, which does not seem likely to be available this time of year, but I mapped out a course to there and then to Yu Sasage, which has a great raspberry chocolate cake as well and is near another shop I want to visit for a first cake, so maybe in two weeks I'll hit Octobre on Saturday and do a reconnaissance run on Sunday.