Jun Honma: Bois de la Cambre/Cambre no Mori

Hitting a maybe quite good shop that's come back into consideration now that I'm penalizing shops less for less than excellent cakes (this is the third and the second was just ok), focusing on the potential for great cakes (which the first one seemed at the time, but I've never seen it since). I went for Cambre no Mori (or Bois de la Cambre, depending on how much of the Japanese you want to translate into French), name for the Belgian park. My reasoning was that the cake that I liked from them had orange and this looked solid enough to travel well by bicycle, which it certainly was. It's a chocolate on top of an orange tart. Actually, it's pretty much chocolate fudge to the point of the chocolate being slightly grainy, presumably from sugar crystals, which is a new experience for me in Japan. This seems like it wouldn't be out of place in a family restaurant or dinner, and it would be a pretty good choice, because it's good at what it does, but it's amazingly crude in aims for a patisserie cake, so I sort of just have to shake my head at it and laugh. It seems very mom and pop's style, but actually this is a branch shop of a shop further along the same train line, and they also have a workshop a little south, so it's all by design. As I said, it was good, and I can laugh at it, so I'm not disappointed really. It's fun to have something from a different kind of shop, but definitely not the kind of shop I'm usually look for, since I'd like something more sophisticated (especially at regular patisserie prices).

[Wednesday] Le Coeur Pur: Cheese Tart

Wednesday, I did another run to Ogikubo looking for Le Coeur Pur, this time with more knowledge (like where they had moved to and that their name was not on the outside and is also a deli bakery). Inside, I cold find bakery products with the name Le Coeur Pur, so I knew it was the correct place but I was running pretty late (so to speak), and they were basically sold out, except some cheese tarts, so I ordered one of those and ate it in. The marked price was 360 yen before taxes, but she rang it up at 200 yen because it was tiny, really only two bites, although I stretched it to three. Although less useful as a measure of more typical cake, it still was rich and definitely good, better than what I usually make, but I'm still just going to stick with good and don't need to hurry back.

Related to running late, I was running fast, burning off some stress and not feeling a need to save any energy for later. Even passing through Shinjuku Station area, I managed 11 km/h average each way. One advantage of tiny cake was I was not weighed down, which suits me, and I could keep my speed up mostly for the entire 20 km. There was another couple kilometers regular grocery shopping running, but I couldn't seem to get my timing skill working by then, so I'm just calling it 9 km/h in my records.