(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).

Monday (holiday): baking at home

I prepared a run course, but slept in instead, which is fine: in general, I don't away sleep so well, so catching up is good and I found myself quite exhausted Monday. I completed the 14 cm peach rum custard tart, which was good but messy (thus, I was forced to eat all of it at once).

The other project was to try to follow my mother's cheese pie recipe exactly, which is a matching problem: cheese comes in 200 g, not 8 oz, evaporated milk comes in 170 ml, not 1/2 cup, and I use 14 cm tart forms instead of a whatever size the pie recipe calls for. At least the eggs match up reasonably well with the can of milk (3 eggs to 1 can). I can deal with leftover cheese more easily. As you can see, the confection oven is a little strong for them, even reducing the cook time 10%. I did not roll out the dough well and/or prepare enough dough, so the crusts had some gaps that leaked, so actually I not only wasted some fill but had leftover, so I've got two more in the oven now. And this time, I got the timing on the dough right (put the dough balls in the frig too long, but waited for them to soften on the counter to the right consistency to be able to roll them out well). However, this time I'm trying baking the crust together with the filling rather than double baking. I know that works with an oil crust, but these are butter crusts, with a lot more sugar (too much I decided, so I reduced from the minimum 30 g to 20 g). Anyway, I froze 3 1/2 of these and tried a piece of one, and it was good except that I thought to taste the cheese more, I needed to decrease the sugar.

Running for speed, home-made custard tart

Updated the weekday map somewhat, but removed the courses, since it's too much trouble to keep it updated. Instead I labeled more relevant landmarks.
Did the 1325 m around Meiji Jinguu Gaien in 6 min 10 sec, which bests my times from last week but is still not so fast. (Did I do a mile in 6 minutes in high school, when I was running a lot?)
Went down to Neues, which had the usual stuff and not what I was looking for (or I need to review), and Libertable, which had the Dahlia that I had had before, so I updated the Libertable post, now that I've confirmed what I had. Coming back meant going around the Akasaka Palace loop. Sort of winged it through the area west of there, taking the hills and half looping back, then taking another slope. I ran over an hour total.
At Libertable, I got a very buttery bread with potato (didn't find pieces, so maybe the flour), for 291 yen, which is high for a tiny bread (it's about 10 cm across, maybe) but okay. It was good.

I didn't get cake for two reasons. One is this:

the second third of the custard in a shell (one of two baked, although I have the dough ready for a third). The shell was a success, in that it holds custard, but since it is butter, flour, sugar, and one egg, it basically tastes like butter. I ate half of this at lunch and the second half with cherries at dinner. A lot of cherries (the second reason), because every year the company gives us 1 kg of already ripe cherries (if you get them shipped, they'll already have turned by the time that you get them, so I pick them up at work). Questioning whether the money could be better spent on something else is not appreciated, so it's cherries every year from the same place; don't consider how it affects the end-of-fiscal-year bonus.

My plan had been to make a banana rum tart tonight, but it was a late work day, so maybe tomorrow. I could substitute cherries, but I want to try the recipe reasonably by the book at least once. Tomorrow is rough weather, although it should mostly pass by the evening. We'll see if running is possible.