Mont St. Clair: Mont St. Clair (Isetan exclusive)

Let's start with the cake: I made a mistake and got the Mont St. Clair from Mont St. Clair, which is an advertised Isetan exclusive this week. It is also coffee buttercream with a layer of coffee gelatin, which is as vile as it sounds (to those who do not like coffee, although the gelatin looked nasty up close even before I tasted it) and 582 yen. It's my mistake, so I can't blame them, but I do not trust them for having more than one cake with coffee in it on display, which makes me doubt that they are the shop for me. Still, I should give them another chance while they are at Isetan, since Jiyugaoka is a tough distance for me right now and I haven't posted anything else on them.

The running was okay. It was relatively crowded at Meiji Gaien with people going faster than me in groups, including sight-limited people running with guides, who I often see there, and no where else. It was raining a little, but not unpleasantly. Walked 1.7 km, ran 4 km, with 1.5 of that at 8 km/s and the rest at 7 km/m, alternating first 100 m and then 200 m and once 300 m, although it was hard not to go too slow or too fast, respectively: I need a bigger difference for real interval training, but I'm still just trying just slowly increase minimum speed running.

In fairness, I should also review my own cake. This is number 4 for my exploration of nut biscuit based cakes, Fraise aux Roses. Actually, the pictured one has been frozen once, the strawberries were frozen to begin with (when I made it), and the butter cream was not that fresh by the time I got around to assembling it, although it did not turn out to be had hard except for using a lot of bowls (I need more mixing bowls).

I don't recommend this cake because the jelly topping, which is delicious and sort of simple, dominates, so you can't really taste the pistachio biscuit (and pistachio powder is triple the cost of almond powder, and pistachio paste is double that), even though it is about twice as thick as it should be. I couldn't really taste the rose from the rose buttercream (which was pretty delicious to begin with and still seemed okay yesterday, when I took this picture) and I substituted cherry liqueur for rose liqueur in the imbibage (syrup for spreading on the cake), because I had a deadline and didn't want to search any more. I make these cakes mostly to learn about the process and the components, so I'm not so disappointed that I'll probably never want to make it again. The next one is even more gelatinous, so I need to get some real cake forms or kludge a really short version using my 14 cm tart forms again.

Also, I've figured out the timing to get my mini-canelé made with the silicone mold nice and brown uniformly without burning the bottoms (tops when baking). Now I have to figure out if that's the way I really like these and try buttering the sides more.  Unlike with the metal brioche forms I was using, no trouble getting these out, but not as chewy on the outside from butter and they have a higher surface-area to volume, so I actually be using more butter rather than less, I think. Of course, I could try beeswax, but I'm not ready to go there yet.