Pierre Hermé: Mille-feuille Plénitude

Decided it was time to go back to the basics with the superb shops that reliably give me great or at least excellent cake. I got the Mille-feuille Plénitude (ミルフィユ プレニチュード; 864) from Pierre Hermé. This is pretty extreme, being a mille-feuille with a fairly thick top layer of caramelized pastry leaves and some lower down, chocolate with fleur de sel (fancy sea salt), two layers (as the main filling) of chocolate mascarpone cheese cream, and caramel-based layer (the word they gives seem to be only used by them, カラメルモワルゥ (karamerumowaruu), but is a kind of caramel gelatin and is fine. It was very good and I appreciated it, but in the end I'm not sure that it was special. Certainly, it's complex and full of good things and the components work together well, so I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt and say excellent. It's pretty expensive, but then there is a lot of it, so it's not unreasonable, even if it is more than I need.

The run was over to the imperial moat course for one lap (5 km). This was not so much a training run in terms of training my body but training for pacing myself on that track, where there are markers every 100 m, but I'm not sure about how accurate they are and I can't read the distance off them like at Meiji Jingu Gaien, so I had to research about where some of the 0.5 km and 1.0 km intervals are relative to where I start. I also tried counting markers as I went, but ended up with one extra one (assuming there are 50). My goal was just +11.0 km/h on the course, which I did, and my run there seemed to be similar, but going back was slower and I was only around 10 km/h. I'm near my current running budget limit, and will remain so through the weekend, it looks like. Currently that means about 69 km/week at 12 km/h (my actual raw distance is now 72.2 km and should break 75 km tomorrow, as I replace last Saturday's fairly fast intervals by a leisurely run down to Hiroo area). Sunday's plan is slightly less than last week, 28 km, which will let me do reconnaissance on two shops for future cake comparisons (maybe in two weeks) and then bring me back paste Octobre to try a new shop (for me) that's not available on a weekday.