Clair de lune: Chocolatine

Big walk mid-week, using a half-day of soon to expire vacation days. Trying to avoid overdoing it, and was a little too successful: the first 8.4 km averaged 4.5 km/h, which I'll count as 3/4 load of 5 km/h. Actually, that was to a pastry and bread goods pro shop first, which was not particular exciting (they had lots of forms for making different shapes).

Nearby in the cheapest looking place I know (it's about on the level of a 40 year old dry cleaners, with a heavy manual sliding door), but the cakes are at a more sophisticated level than one would expect to the exterior. They were working hard in the back (also tiny) seemed like, so I suppose they have contracts somewhere.


Anyway, got the Chocolatine for 540, which is just your standard chocolate mousse cake under chocolate glaze with a little pistachio mousse in the middle. They asked if I wanted take out or each in, which surprised me, but there is a sort of shelf bar created by one side of the baked goods display table, so you can sit back there under the liquor bottles and next to the mini-fridge or freezer with a couple bags of almond powder on top (see first photo), for lack of anywhere better to store them. So I ate in (declining the 200 yen coffee, since I don't drink coffee), and when she brought the cake, she said that ideally I should wait 1 or 2 minutes for it to reach the optimal temperature, so I did. And it was great. Still just the standard cake, but it totally worked as chocolate mousse (pistachio wasn't very strong) and I doubt that I've have better, and I've had several I think, but only blogged a couple, from Yamamuro and Toshi Yoroizuka. So, still an excellent shop after three cakes.

I walked back at a more normal but tire pace, 10 km at 5 km/h. My plan is for the next two shops to also be third cakes from they same tier, since I did three supposedly great jobs in a row, and there are only three of them left with new cakes anyway, so it the blogging and visiting was getting kind of repetative, but most other places are farther away, so I either need to go slow or weight until I build up my distance. I'll rest tomorrow (well, stretch inside) and then hit a near by one Saturday, maybe, and do another similar distance one to day on Sunday.