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.