14 Juillet Tokyo: Pensee

Since Sweet Sonobe posted on 14 Juillet Tokyo, I figured I might as well try it. Also, I want to go to lunch around there Saturday morning, so I wanted scope out options in the Shin Marunouchi Building and Marunouchi Building, though mostly I just looked at the latter, since I found my cake shop before many restaurants.

The run there was a fast 12 km/h, whereas the return trip was a reasonable (for carrying cake) 10 km/h, for a today of about 11 km. I didn't run yesterday, so I was in the mood. I'm busy this weekend, so I'll probably have a lot of budget for long runs at the beginning of the week, but not now. When I've got 21 km to use on a weekday, I'd like to get down to Paris S'éveille again, this time for cake. I can just barely get there, if I'm not too busy with work, which lately I often am.

The cake was Pensee (パンセ; 470 yen), which is almond cocoa biscuit sandwiching a little raspberry jam. Sorry, must not have hit the "flower" setting on my camera, so it looks a little fuzzy. It was definitely good cake, but it took me a while to convince myself that it was excellent. It certainly isn't as complex or rich as my usual favorite cakes, but it isn't light and it's well balanced between the chocolate and raspberry. I can certainly see times when this is exactly what I would want or trying to make it myself (if I were any good at making cakes, which I'm not), and that makes it excellent cake. Also, it's a first cake from them, so they get the benefit of the doubt. It was certainly much better than I was expecting, though I haven't heard anything bad about them (or really any cake shop, except from myself).

Octobre: Gateau Marron

Today was a long reconnaissance run for finding availability of two great cakes for comparison. I started by going down to Origines Cacao, though I had to be careful to avoid the Shinjuku Half Marathon, which was this morning. Fortunately, they take a bridge over Gaiennishidori (Outer Garden West Avenue), and I could escape them, although there is also a pedestrian bridge over the same road that they are on further west that would work, but I was already more west then I wanted for getting to Jiyugaoka via Aoyama Avenue while avoiding the Shibuya Station area. It was about 11 km, which I did in just under 1 h. The rest (about 17 km) today was 10 km/h average.

As it turned out, Origines Cacao not only did not have my target great cake (Martinique), they did not have any of the other three great cakes from there that I'll eventually want to do a comparison with. I'll have to check in with them in a month. Fortunately, there are a lot of things around there of interest to take me to that area. If I had been thinking more ahead, I would have also checked in at Dalloyau (I know they don't have Opale, from asking at the main shop in Ginza, but I didn't ask about any other ones, and by going early, everything would presumable be out, so I don't have to ask). I did think of check Paris S'éveille, but mainly because I wanted to get a pastry there. They had 4 of 6 great cakes out, with the other two definitely being summery. As a snack/fuel, I got Pain Chocolat (under 300 yen), which was great. It's actually really big, because there's a lot of air, and croissant buttery. It's very messy though, of course, because of the layers breaking off, and the chocolate was all along one side and I made the mistake of starting on the other side.

Even though my base cake for comparison turned out not to be available, I still tried to stick to my original plan to run to Bigarreaux, since they have a couple great cakes that I'll eventually want to compare to something, but I forgot one of the turns and overshot the shop in the direction toward my next goal, so I decided to just keep going to Octobre rather than double back. This was my first cake from them, so I picked up their card and noticed that they've crossed out 20:00 as the closing time and written in 19:00, so mistaking their closing time the other night was not so unreasonable. Since it was the recommended cake, I got the Gateau Marron (ガトーマロン; 496 yen), which, as advertised, is a very dense chestnut cake, "almost chestnut paste", the card said, although the inside is definitely dense cake (like pound cake) and the outside of the dome, which is fairly thick (maybe 1 cm in places, so it might have been about half the cake) is fairly solid somewhat hard, toward being crystalline or a hard frosting. It was not overly sweet and it was not a strong chestnut flavor, which was good for me, and I thought it was excellent enough that I should try a second cake to see whether this is really a potentially excellent shop. Not sure when I'll get a chance to get out there again, though, as I'm busy this weekend.

The next great cake to try to compare in the list is Aigre-Douce Fraicheur Framboise, which does not seem likely to be available this time of year, but I mapped out a course to there and then to Yu Sasage, which has a great raspberry chocolate cake as well and is near another shop I want to visit for a first cake, so maybe in two weeks I'll hit Octobre on Saturday and do a reconnaissance run on Sunday.

A. Lecomte: Patricien

Run and cake pretty much went exactly as planned: about 11 km/h out and 10 km/h back with cake, for about 9 km total to A. Lecomte in Minamiazabu, which is next to Hiroo station on the east side, where all the embassies are. The shop was not heavily staffed and someone had ordered a bunch of things as gifts, so it took them a while to get to me (otherwise, there were no other customers but a couple that came in for the tea salon in the basement). I choose the Patricien (パトリシアン; 540 yen), which is one of their standards, besides being photogenic. It's got praliné and hazelnut flavored creams under that chocolate coating, but is fairly light. I like heavy, but this was definitely good hopefully is a good representative of this shop. I've had a few of their other cakes at other times and didn't find anything that was special. Now, I'm trying trying to a visit to all the probably good shops on my map to get in at least one blog entry.

Pierre Hermé: Mille-feuille Plénitude

Decided it was time to go back to the basics with the superb shops that reliably give me great or at least excellent cake. I got the Mille-feuille Plénitude (ミルフィユ プレニチュード; 864) from Pierre Hermé. This is pretty extreme, being a mille-feuille with a fairly thick top layer of caramelized pastry leaves and some lower down, chocolate with fleur de sel (fancy sea salt), two layers (as the main filling) of chocolate mascarpone cheese cream, and caramel-based layer (the word they gives seem to be only used by them, カラメルモワルゥ (karamerumowaruu), but is a kind of caramel gelatin and is fine. It was very good and I appreciated it, but in the end I'm not sure that it was special. Certainly, it's complex and full of good things and the components work together well, so I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt and say excellent. It's pretty expensive, but then there is a lot of it, so it's not unreasonable, even if it is more than I need.

The run was over to the imperial moat course for one lap (5 km). This was not so much a training run in terms of training my body but training for pacing myself on that track, where there are markers every 100 m, but I'm not sure about how accurate they are and I can't read the distance off them like at Meiji Jingu Gaien, so I had to research about where some of the 0.5 km and 1.0 km intervals are relative to where I start. I also tried counting markers as I went, but ended up with one extra one (assuming there are 50). My goal was just +11.0 km/h on the course, which I did, and my run there seemed to be similar, but going back was slower and I was only around 10 km/h. I'm near my current running budget limit, and will remain so through the weekend, it looks like. Currently that means about 69 km/week at 12 km/h (my actual raw distance is now 72.2 km and should break 75 km tomorrow, as I replace last Saturday's fairly fast intervals by a leisurely run down to Hiroo area). Sunday's plan is slightly less than last week, 28 km, which will let me do reconnaissance on two shops for future cake comparisons (maybe in two weeks) and then bring me back paste Octobre to try a new shop (for me) that's not available on a weekday.

Fiorentina Pastry Boutique: Marquise

Decided that consecutive training days is no fun, so I'm not going to do that. Fortunately, I wanted to get back to Fiorentina Pastry Boutique, which is close, so I did a leisurely run, just 10 km/h for only about 7 km round trip. The cake was Marquise　（マラキューズ; 594 yen), which is chocolate sponge with chocolate ganache. It was definitely good, but not groundbreaking, which is sort of the best you can expect from a Hotel patisserie, which is reasonable. They pretty need to be noncontroversial and cover the basics. However, they should know not to try to stabilize a cake for transport by taping a support to the loose napkin under it. Still, it survived reasonably well, considering.

Chianti: Mont-Blanc

Today was a training run, so I went to Isetan when I could (we were understaffed at work today, so it was a long day) and fortunately there was something left. I think this is called a Mont-Blanc, but I wasn't really reading the Japanese name that closely and it could have the Italian version name, since Chianti is an Italian restaurant. This cake seemed a pretty typical Japanese version anyway. A very smooth, slightly buttery (but no way near Dalloyau's level of almost pure butter taste) chestnut paste, which was most of it, around a little unbaked meringue, so no whipped cream, I think, and no baked base. Among Mont-Blancs, this seemed excellent, plus it's a first cake, so I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. They shouldn't really be that hard to visit that I need to get them at Isetan, since they are in Azabudai and Yoyogiuehara, as well as some department stores, but I'm not sure exactly which places have fresh cake for takeout, so I'll probably hit Isetan again before they are gone.

The training run was 5 laps at >=12.0 km/h each at Meiji Jingu Gaien. For some reason, was I pessimistic going out. I guess because I was r
eally sore after 4 laps, also it was cold (I start wondering whether I'm going to freeze but then it doesn't become a problem, versus overdressing and being fine at the beginning and then getting too hot). The first lap (after the warm up getting there, and my routine running "switches", versus stretches, though I have some of those) was in some way the hardest. I have to check my time every 100 m and keep increasing the pressure on myself. Of course, the 5th lap is also hard, since that's where all the new training is, but by that point my body knows what it needs to do, even if it's become harder to do it than previous laps. All laps were successful, and the last one edged into 13 km/h territory, so I can probably scale that back and do 6 laps, though I'd like to do some running on my other two main courses first, as well as faster intervals.

Jean-Paul Hévin (Marunouchi): Guérande,

I'm behind, so this is on Tuesday. I had a busy schedule of running planned, though it required modification and the cake side was mixed, like last time.

First, I had to stop by a local shrine and get rid of a worn out charm (or so I was told). Then it was off to the Isetan Men's Salone, which has a Jean-Paul Hévin chocolate "café". I was looking for new cakes, but the reason I was expecting there might be something was that Valentine's Day is coming up and they had multiple special cakes for Christmas, but they said they we're not doing anything special for cake for this holiday. However, they had Guérande (グランド; 583 yen), which I hadn't had, so I sat down and had it. What I was told was that there was salt and also crepe, giving it crunch, both true, I think. At the same time, I was readying the card and only got to chiboust, which I think is just that little line in the middle, since I couldn't see that any of the rest of it was especially egg heavy. It was definitely excellent, I thought as I ate it, but was it really great if I compared it to other chocolate cakes that were great? I thought probably not. However, the problem was I then didn't drink enough water and didn't brush my teeth or even wash my mouth out. So even though it did not seem salty when I ate it, baked crepe tends to stick in the back teeth and I ended up tasting the salt for the rest of the run, which I do not like, though it was not so strong as to make me feel sick (which salt can do to me, if it's like big crystals on a pretzel or chocolate. So be careful careful of the after effects if you have this cake, but most people don't just eat a piece of cake with a little water and then run.

Next task was to go to Dalloyau to see whether they had Opale (or Opalé?), so I could compare it to another cake over the weekend. In fact, no, and it does not have a regular schedule, so I had to scrap my weekend plan and come up with something else to compare a rather unusual cake from Origines Cacao (which may not have that cake, either), thus being behind now. Anyway, the goal was information, so job done. I had been planning to go another two blocks for my cake that day, but since JPH had had something new, that was out, so instead I headed home. However, since I was off plan, I just sort of winged it and went back zig-zagging on a lot of different roads that I usually never use (and now know not too, since they are mainly too crowded with people for the sidewalk width).

In total, I ran about 11 km (I walked in Ginza and coming out as far as Hibiya Park), all at 12 km/h, though on the low side (around 11.7 km/h).
.



Jean-Paul Hévin, Marunouchi, Chuo-ku, Guérande, Tokyo cake, running, salt, chiboust, feuillantine, chocolate,