Cake-off: Bien-être's Framboisier over Cacao Store (Théobroma)'s San Juaquin Dos

Thursday, having already had three weekday cakes, I ran again for cake-off research, this time to the Yoyogi area, where I had more success. Cacao Store promised to have their (actually, Théobroma's) San Juaquin Dos through Saturday. Bien-être admitted the possibility of something, but probably not Framboisier, which they had in stock at that time, but it was too late to go back to Cacao Store. 

So Friday after, after failing again elsewhere, I visited both and got the desired cakes, moving up the cake off by one day. I suspect that the Framboisier was left over from the previous day, but some cakes age better. No running Friday, just cycling. These are both pretty standard cakes, which is why I designated them great to begin with, but this time I was not convinced that San Juaquin Dos really belongs, though it is excellent as a dense chocolate cake that probably also can survive more than one day. More importantly, Bien-être had several new cakes on Friday, so I hope they will still have them when Christmas cake season ends.

Saturday I got my flu shot, so I took it easy. I still went out by bicycle to buy some chocolate for baking, take a picture Lotus, a café in Jinguumae that does cakes until 4 am, and got a Pain au Chocolat from Shibuichi Bakery. The pastry wasn't that impressive, though it was still somewhat good.

Sunday, I had repeats of cakes and no running. JPH cakes are still excellent.

Monday, I went for a long run to add a bunch of loops to my neighborhood course by doing a one-way neighborhood course run, which is taking a lot of time to update (partially because I found mistakes from last time I updated it to add loops). I don't usually try to combine photo-taking with the first such run, but I wanted to make use of the opportunity. I'm working on the path west from Roppongi Hills to connect up to loops that I previously thought I could only get to by a longer way circling around from the north. It was about 2 hours of running, plus walking and taking pictures. At L'Atelier du Pain, there just south of Roppongi Hills, I got a Pain au Chocolat. Though it's not looking so symmetric, you can see on the left that it's got proper layering and that it's well baked, so actually it was excellent. Usually I never go to Roppongi Hills, so it's not that convenient a shop, but it's at about the 1 hour mark, so next time I go out for a neighborhood run along that route, I can stop there again.

Ryoura, Clair

Croissant from Shibuichi Bakery

Sunday, I decide to change my plan to get my next JPH cake (I'll go tomorrow), and instead ran out to Ryoura (since I can't go on a workday). It was a shorter run, but I didn't go direct. I went first to the north end of Meiji Shrine grounds and walked to the shrine and out to the south end (it's posted "no jogging", and there are guard to enforce it, plus thousands of people, though the path is wide). From there I went down to Shibuichi Bakery again, now that it was open, and got a Croissant which was excellent I guess. Certainly it was sufficiently flaky and light enough in the middle for me, though the excellence might owe more to the fact that I'm not able to get to them early in the day very often. Blogger apparently doesn't want to rotate this picture, so you get the sideways version.

Hikawa-dai Children's Playground

From there, it's mostly west to Ryoura, more west than the roads run, so there were some turns. I stopped at a couple landmarks for future neighborhood courses (if I get the current one's mastered so I can expand again), just to chip away at them. At Ryoura, I made a mistake and ordered Clair, which has chestnut mousse, orange-flavored almond caramel (not sure what that means, but it sounds good), but, and I missed this until I had already ordered, confirmed, and payed, coffee crème brûlée. I considered pleading for an exchange but decided to take responsibility.

Clair from Ryoura

Though at first a little disappointed, I came to look forward to the challenge, as it's inconvenient to have to avoid coffee. As it happens, it was good and it didn't leave a sickening aftertaste, which marks a huge improvement over most experiences, so I'm going to call it excellent, because I would at least get it again for someone else, even if I'm okay with no coffee-flavored cakes for another year. However, I've seen JPH's Christmas line-up, and I may end of another cake with coffee this year (plus, JPH's other coffee flavored cake, while not my favorite, was still pretty good as well).