L'Abricotier, Duja Orange

 I wasn't intentionally being greedy, just sticking to plan and went to L'Abricotier for the new cake they should have gotten before the last Viron cake. It's only another 8 km after 5 km to Ginza, so less of a daily run than the previous day so I was expecting to come up empty and have to go on to Yu Sasage, which I assume would be as far, but actually there were two new cakes to choose from. For today, I skipped the raspberry chocolate cake and took the Duja Orange. This shop is big on pairing nutty with fruit, so even though orange is a difficult fruit, I was interested in how it would pair with Gianduja (chocolate and hazelnut). Once again, I got lost on the trains, so it took twice as long as it should have to get back. I liked this cake, which I can say is definitely excellent. Mainly, I like the Gianduja cut with enough other stuff not to be too strong, though maybe orange isn't the perfect fruit.

Café Le Cordon Bleu: Earlgrey Chocolate, Macaron Chocolat Gianduja

Saturday, went to a new place for cake for two, which is to say I had half of each of these first two cakes, Café Le Cordon Bleu (supposedly the current name, though the old name is still on the receipt: Le Cordon Bleu La Boutique). It is close to the old Asakura Family Estate, which dates from early Showa (about a hundred years ago), which is a cheap (100 yen/person) visit. Back to the cafe, it is self-serve and has a limited selection of cake, pastries, bread, and simple cafe lunch, salad maybe. On a Saturday, they ran out of at least one of our cakes shortly after us, maybe a little before 3 pm.

Both of these are chocolate (there was also a strawberry mousse/cream and a cream puff), but are quite different. One is Earlgrey Chocolate, a fairly standard mousse cake, but definitely good. The tea gives, well a tea taste, but I would say it makes the chocolate a little fruity. The other cake is a macaron, Macaron Chocolate Gianduja, and I advised cutting it, though it turned out that picking it up was very possible, as there is a center of chopped nuts (I assume hazelnuts) in chocolate that acted as a central post while not offering resistance to biting (so it was sort of sticky rather than solid). This sort of heavy cake is more my preference, so I thought this was excellent. Based on two cakes, it seems a quite good shop, which is a fairly good find for just a local shop I noticed on my neighborhood route.

Caffarel: Gianduia

Had reason to be inside JR Station, so I finally got a cake from Caffarel to blog on, their signature Gianduia, which is gianduia brulée cream on top of chocolate cream with a some raspberry filling. It was definitely good, but not especially compelling among the crowded field of chocolate cakes. Strictly speaking, this was not my first cake from them, or even maybe even my first cake from them since starting to blog (and probably not my first time to even have this particular cake), but my other encounters were in Kobe.

For running, I finally got back to my neighborhood course and finished doing a one-way neighborhood run completing the Jinguumae east loop, Kita-Aoyama central loop, Minami-Aoyama north loop, and newly added Kasumigaokamachi--Kita-Aoyama loop.

The Ritz-Carlton Café and Deli: Earl Grey Bergamot

Sunday, without running, I went to the The Ritz-Carlton Café and Deli and, after some wait (because we didn't want to eat outside), I got the cake set with the Earl Grey Bergamot (this was the English name on the card, but the Japanese name was completely different). Anyway, it is a chocolate mousse ovoid disk flavored orange (I'm assuming the tea as well). The base was chocolate and crunchy, which helped it. It was at least definitely good and I've giving it the first cake benefit of the doubt and calling it excellent, so I'll be back there before too long. They also have a selection of pastries. The other available cake with the cake set was the strawberry short cake, which I only had one bite of. It seemed good, but I'd like to have more to form a full opinion.

Monday, much of Tokyo closed down due to a few inches of snow. It was still reasonably nice for a run, so I went to Bubó Barcelona and got Gianduja Raviolo, which is a croissant-type pastry encasing some, but not a lot of gianduja (hazelnut and chocolate). It was a nice change of pastry from must a simple croissant, so I can call it excellent. They did not actually have anything else, so I'm not sure what's going on with their pastry selection. Even if I don't get a pastry, I'm going to have to stop in their next time I go by. However, the nearby pedestrian bridge was taped off, which means that right now that neighborhood, which I haven't quite got memorized, but close, is cut off, so I don't have 60 km of continuous neighborhood course prepared any more. I thought it might have just been for the weather, but later pedestrian bridges on other paths were not closed.