Cake-off: Frédéric Cassel's Choux Vanille over Jean-Paul Hévin's Macaron Chocolat a l'Ancienne

Started off at about 10 am for Ginza Mitsukoshi to get cakes for a first-round cake-off between Frédéric Cassel's Choux Vanille and Jean-Paul Hévin's Macaron Chocolat a l'Ancienne, which was just restored in the August line-up. Besides being available from the same department store, they are from my top two favorite shops and are both unique among my great list. As types, though they are completely opposites. This round goes to Frédéric Cassel's Choux Vanille. The simplicity and quality of the filling is key, but sugar coating of the pastry really gives this cake a nice texture as well. I really need to try one of their variations. The macaron is sort of an excuse to eat a lot of fairly solid dark chocolate, which is not a bad thing, and I like a dry chewy macaron compared to a moist one, in general.

I did about another 90 minutes of running later, taking photos to fill in/verify a bunch of locations on my local running courses, in this case on the east side, so I ended up running around the American Embassy. In the last couple years or so, they built a big commercial development across from it that has nothing much of interest to me (I'm interested in the old Austrian cake shop on the far side, though they are always closed Sundays). As part of that, there is a kind of park running through it with narrow twisty paths, so I did not notice the cop in the middle until fairly close. Not a problem, but I wonder how far he can see just standing there. Maybe it it's not that dense and you can see through well enough once you get used to it, at least from that exact spot.