Cake-off: Jean-Paul Hévin's Tarte au Chocolat over Frédéric Cassel's Mont Blanc Jewel

Since rain was forecast as increasing throughout the day and my feet seemed reasonably okay, I went our running south to visit sites on my neighborhood map through Hiroo. Took some pictures, found that one temple had been replaced by a construction project (I should have checked of what), so I deleted that loop from my neighborhood course. At 10 am, after maybe 50 minutes of running, I checked and found that I was farther away from Ginza Mitsukoshi than when I started, but not by a lot. I picked up a few more pictures along the way and got there around 11 am. I was able to get both of my target cakes, Jean-Paul Hévin's Tarte au Chocolat and Frédéric Cassel's Mont Blanc Jewel, for a second-round cake-off. The latter was next in the list for the round and the former will end its one-month run tomorrow. The big discovery, though, was that Ginza Mitsukoshi had the JPH Mille-feuille Chocolat, which I've been looked for and would have been a higher priority. Apparently, it is an exclusive there, so now I'm going to need to run around every month checking every shop for unannounced exclusives, which is inconvenient, but does provide some direction to my running. Wish I had noticed before I had the second-to-last day of the month after I'd already bought one cake.

Ate the cakes at home. Hope that the issue of overlooking a cake did not affect my appreciation, but I has having a hard time sensing the greatness today. Still, definitely excellent cakes and I definitely see the unique good points of both with respect to my great cakes list. I'm giving the round to the tart and marking the mont-blanc down as possibly not great (it will get another round, but if I'm not convinced then, I'll knock it down to semigreat). It's good point is probably that it is the fruitiest mont-blancs on my list. If JPH has a couple new cakes next month, I'll be able to get them, but otherwise I've noticed that it's time for me to try something new of theirs, fresh cake or not, which goes well with my newly recognized need to visit their different shops more regularly (though I'm still only going to buy non-cake things from Isetan and Mitsukoshi, probably).