Pierre Hermé: Tarte Infiniment Mandarin

Today, I got the tart I skipped yesterday, Pierre Hermé's Tarte Infiniment Mandarin. Also, I check at Jean-Paul Hévin's and supposedly they are celebrating 15 years in Japan, so it's reasonable to suspect that other shops besides the one in Isetan may have special cakes; I should look around. Maybe I'll do that Saturday, though I've got an excellent shop to get a fourth cake from. Today, I tried what I'll call a neighbor culture and cake run, where I visit local culture spots, include any cake shops, on a local run. I missed my first turn only about 100 m in, so I didn't make it far, though the first course was only 400 m. It just goes around a couple parks and a shrine that are grouped in one block, so I'm going to change my start point to be somewhere not requiring that I tell one house or apartment building from another in the dark. Also, I decided to add the police box (it's a kouban, which is not actually a box, but close enough translation), since that's as import a landmark as a train station (both may have officials that you can ask directions from). In course two, which is about 3 km long (or was until today's revision), I forgot the route two-thirds in and thought that I was off it, but since I remembered where I had to go, I ended up following the correct route after all (since there was not a better way to do the four locations in the order that I could remember). I did mess up my timing, though, so I'm guessing that I ran about 6 km total at 9 km/h. I do know that I ran about 40 minutes. I explored the next neighborhood over a little more deeply than yesterday, finding a couple parks I'm not familiar with and seeing where there are problems.

The Tarte Infiniment Mandarin tasted more like a lemon tart than orange, but that's a good thing (I'm not sure I've ever seen an orange tart, not counting this). This uses all parts, including the peal, so it has a good citrus tang for a tart but is different from lemon. The trust is a very tough one, so I probably should have used a sharper or serrated knife, but it was not overly brittle, so it didn't fall apart despite my crude efforts. I'm going to say that it's great, it being the top of its type, as far as I know; those kinds of ratings don't always hold up as well under cake-off conditions versus something that appeals to my particular tastes, but I'm not sure that they repeat cakes enough for that to matter (I'm still waiting from some citron cakes that I "great"ed a couple years ago to reappear).