Yoshinori Asami: Étoile

Again today, I went to Isetan for the visiting pâtisserie, which had changed to Yoshinori Asami. It's only a priority because it's convenient and a little cheaper there due to cards. Fortunately, this time I got there before they sold out, which they sometimes do on the first day, as they did yesterday on the last day of Blondir. I was disappointed that they did not return with their Van Dyke, since I've only ever found that when they were visiting Isetan and its my favorite of theirs, but I still had a reasonable selection of mostly things I haven't had before. I went with Étoile. Despite the name, this cake reminds me more of cakes from German or Eastern European cake shops. Rather than a few layers of almond-flour biscuit (or some of it might have been hazelnut; I didn't finish reading the card) and heavy ganache balanced by cream layers, this was alternating biscuits and ganache all the way down, with one fruity layer, though I'm not sure what. Very heavy, but still definitely good: I really appreciate having this type of cake occasionally, so I'm not at all disappointed, but it's drier than the cakes I like the most and maybe I don't really have enough experience to judge well whether a particular one is excellent or even great. That's a project I'll probably never get around to, focusing on specific types of cake.

The running was on the neighborhood course, where I verified kilometer markers 12 to 20, which took me to the other side of Omotesando Avenue, and came back home, so over 11 km. For the measured ones, I kept my target long-distance pace of 7 min/km pretty well, despite some slowdowns for congestion or automobile traffic, so I'm ready to try 20 km at that pace (which shouldn't be very hard, but takes time) but have other plans for at least through Saturday.