36 km to La Noboutique: Chocolat Noir and Sicily

Took Yamanotedoori south and then came back up by route 17, which starts out as No. 1 Tokyo-Yokohama road but changes names or switches paths a couple times: route. The west side was as I've seen before near Nakameguro: temporary asphalt sidewalk, highway-type steel barriers, and traffic barricades  rather than brick sidewalk and the regular fences/barriers. Still, it was okay. Route 17 as okay too, although crowded right at Shinagawa Station, even at 8 a.m on Sunday, and Ginza was a pain because the lights are so frequent that I had to spend half my time stopped (although a cheated some times). At the far north end was best, the last few kilometers before the city hall of Itabashi District, where it meets up with Yamanotedoori, but other parts up to there were fine. I'm thinking that my previous journeys outside of Tokyo should have followed a road like this: a main radial road from central Tokyo. I've complained about the main roads crossing into Kanagawa pref., but those were actually connecting suburbs between prefectures. Maybe I should take a radial road from the center first and then turn west inside the neighboring prefecture to find routes that don't feel like truck routes.

The actual run was good too. I've been trying to do 6 min/km, and I did that for 35 km (Google route finder says 36.0 km, but using Google distance measuring tool, I got exactly 35.0 km). It worked about like my laps: it became harder as I went but I kept that in mind and worked myself harder, and it managed to balance out without my having to think about it too hard. I only check about once every 5 or 10 km, so I can't really make micro-corrections to my speed. Since I'm happy with the speed for long distances, I could up the distance to 40 km or more next, but actually I've already planned out a route that is more about navigation and visiting two shops along the way (so actual cake running might be involved, but maybe only to the nearest park) and even that is going to have to wait a couple weeks.

Today's cake was far from great, at least from the target shop, La Noboutique. These were Chocolat Noir for 390 yen and Sicily for 420 yen (or at least those are my guesses from the Japanese phonetic spellings). The chocolat seems to be just chocolate flavored whipped cream as the filling (the website says ganache, which apparently covers a wide territory of chocolate-dairy mixtures, based on my experience) and there is a tiny bit of nuts in the topping. Just too weak for me. I expect this from Henri Charpentier or Ginza Cozy Corner. It was not watery bad, but it was just okay and something I want to avoid. Sicily is pistachio and either strawberry or raspberry mousse, but was about the same: just okay. The combination left a bad taste in my mouth, figuratively and literally. But they did give me 5 yen "service" in the form of rounding the total down to the nearest 10 yen, so I should mention that.

Unlike yesterday, I did not restrain myself and went out again to Fraoula (by bicycle) and got their new Mille Feuille for 432 yen, along with a Croissant d'Almande for 237 yen. The Mille Feuille was fine. The interesting point was that only the top was a solid piece (in a few layers), whereas the rest was flakes, so that you could cut through it easily, which is one solution to make it easier to eat. The croissant (which does not count as a fourth cake) was very good, maybe better than any of the cakes, which does not surprise me from there.