Les Cacaos, Pistache

Went out by bicycle and confirmed a couple sites I had just added to the revised loop south of Shibuya Station, then went as far out as Oyamadai to check the line-ups of a couple shops, and returned east to get cake from Les Cacaos. It's been a while, and the one great cake I've had there has been absent for several years (probably because Cuban chocolate is not so common). This time I got Pistache, which is pistachio and a high amount of cacao, supposedly. Neither made much of an impression separately or in harmonization. This is a soft (sponge) cake, but may with some sort of fruit with seeds, because there was some of that unpleasant raspberry seed feeling, though I didn't track it down. It didn't taste bad, but especially under the new rating system, I want to say that this was just ok. Les Cacaos hold on its shop group status (which I'm going to change from excellent to exceptional, in revising to avoid overlap between cake ratings and shop ratings) was weak to begin with, but I'll have to see what the competition can manage. Specifically, it and La Vie Douce were identical before this cake, so it wouldn't take much for me to swap these two shops.

De Bon Coeur: Passion Mousse Chocolat

Tonight, despite cooling off more than I had hoped and a somewhat strong wind, I did my longest round trip workday with cake (I say without checking the previous hundreds of entries). I went to De Bon Coeur, in Shinagawa, which you get to going south of Meguro Station (if you want to go to Meguro, you need to go west: the station is in Shinagawa, whereas Shinagawa Station is in Minato-ku, which doesn't need a station because it's in the middle). It took me 9 km out, slightly slow, and 8.8 km back very slow, with a little rain and carrying a Passion Mousse Chocolat, which I got for 691 yen.

The run and route is okay, mostly familiar, along a history & culture route for much of the last stretch.


The cake is a fairly solid mousse (which is I suppose good, since I ran it almost 9 km and a gelatin-less mousse would just puddle with that much vibration, maybe). I have to wonder if there is cheese in it (didn't read the card that thoroughly, as usual), just because that seems to be a general specialty, or it's just gelatinous for the usual reasons. The chocolate is coating on the outside, some mousse in the middle and some cake on the bottom. The passion fruit is just the small section on the right. Note sure what the large white section is, since there is no taste, which is why I wonder if it is cheese. The is good, as far as being good quality and not bad tasting, but no better, so I'll switch the rating of the shop to "Good?" on the map and look at other potentially excellent shops that I've had less than two cakes blogged from.