Café Le Cordon Bleu: Earlgrey Chocolate, Macaron Chocolat Gianduja

Saturday, went to a new place for cake for two, which is to say I had half of each of these first two cakes, Café Le Cordon Bleu (supposedly the current name, though the old name is still on the receipt: Le Cordon Bleu La Boutique). It is close to the old Asakura Family Estate, which dates from early Showa (about a hundred years ago), which is a cheap (100 yen/person) visit. Back to the cafe, it is self-serve and has a limited selection of cake, pastries, bread, and simple cafe lunch, salad maybe. On a Saturday, they ran out of at least one of our cakes shortly after us, maybe a little before 3 pm.

Both of these are chocolate (there was also a strawberry mousse/cream and a cream puff), but are quite different. One is Earlgrey Chocolate, a fairly standard mousse cake, but definitely good. The tea gives, well a tea taste, but I would say it makes the chocolate a little fruity. The other cake is a macaron, Macaron Chocolate Gianduja, and I advised cutting it, though it turned out that picking it up was very possible, as there is a center of chopped nuts (I assume hazelnuts) in chocolate that acted as a central post while not offering resistance to biting (so it was sort of sticky rather than solid). This sort of heavy cake is more my preference, so I thought this was excellent. Based on two cakes, it seems a quite good shop, which is a fairly good find for just a local shop I noticed on my neighborhood route.