Rainy day running near Meiji Jingu Gaien: Guayaquil from Jean-Paul Hevin

It's another rainy day, so I got cake first. Well, actually I visited Tokyu Hands first and they had lots of cake pans today, although they were called something different than in my recipe book and none of them were the required size (and few listed their size in centimeters), which is just as well, because I do not have an industrial oven and can't do 30 cm by 40 cm. Still, once I get actual ingredients, I think I'll try to find a small pan for a trial before getting a larger pan. I can do up to 30 by 30 cm with my oven. As far as ingredients, what I need first is egg whites (I'd like to get powered) and hazelnut powder (I've only seen almond). Maybe this weekend I'll get over to Cuoca (not that I can't order online, but I'd like to see their pans, too).

Anyway, for the run, I ran around Meiji Jingu Gaien area. Because I had been trying to do intervals lately, I wondered about doing intervals by distance, since there are 100 m markers there. My easy run (after a 1 km warm-up) was about 40 s, hard was 30 s, and all-out was around 23 or 24 s. Maybe my next thing will be to set a lap speed and see how many laps I can keep it up, but again, it would be easier to do that with a watch that gave me a signal at regular intervals (although I worry about running down the battery quickly). Eventually, I'll care enough to go shopping at a store and see if I can actually try something and see whether it does what I want, which I've only did a little and looked on-line.

I ran about 1 hour, which is not so long, but I kept up a pretty good speed and stopped very little (I avoided standing at stoplights, but just took paths that were available, trying new places).

The cake that I was waiting for was the Guayaquil from Jean-Paul Hévin which was 685 yen (I pointed out that the card said 618 yen, but that did not even get me a freebie, although two people apologized and one person went back to consult someone higher up; butter prices and the weak yen are driving up cake prices everywhere, I've noticed).  The cake is their standard bitter chocolate cake, which is completely great. It's hard to imagine better chocolate cake, but I should acknowledge two things: (i) I had drunk about two glasses of red wine before, so I was feeling pretty positive; (ii) I've had this cake in the past and been disappointed, so you have to watch out for times when it's too humid and hot for this cake; in this case, it went into the refrigerator for a couple hours before I ate it and the temperature is down to below 30 today, although rainy, so not full summer heat, much less the extreme heat that we broke records with this year in Tokyo.

Materiel did not have the same raspberry cake when I went today, so I can't update that post yet.