à tes souhaits! Pistache d'Abricot

Monday, which is a national holiday, I ran out to à tes souhaits! with a couple back-ups in mind further out from there in case they were closed or my patience was insufficient. The person in front of me counted 21 people in front of her when she called her partner. That's about typical for this shop on a weekend (it's reasonably accessible on a weekday). They were well staffed, so the line moved a little faster than I expected, but I was glad that I had an extra jacket, long pants, and hat in my bag for the outside part of the wait (if felt nicely warm at first when I first entered, but the door is open, so not so much once I got used to it), though the person several spots ahead who also looked like he ran there was not visibly suffering without doing so. I limited myself to only a few pictures of sites that could potentially be on future neighborhood course additions.

Selection was pretty good. I went for Pistache d'Abricot, which looked like something I would like. The apricot is a layer on top, under which is pistachio mousse (with pistachio cream on top), but under that there are nutty layers, including feuillantine praliné, which I don't usually associate with a fruity cake but I do associate with modern traditional fancy cake, so my regard for them has improved. This was definitely excellent cake. I suppose the distance was about 14 km, including about 1 km to and from stations coming back (the cake was fine, though maybe only because the mousse proportion was low).

This shop will make the cut when the quite good shops gets trimmed down to half their current size (hopefully), once I get all the current group up to 3 cakes each, which will make the designation more significant. Right now this category is just the not definitely below average group, though that's average among the places that I'm will to visit. For example, there was a much smaller patisserie 300 meters away that didn't seem to be having trouble with lines.

In the late afternoon, I went out again and completed verifying my memory of the Jinguumae central loop and then did clockwise on the new version of the Jinguumae northwest loop (probably wasn't necessary to change it, but it was nice to get some of it off Takeshita street, which is difficult to do even a slow walk due to crowds and finished off the linked Jinguumae central west loop. My plan is to finish off the Jinguumae northwest loop next, and then continue down to the revised Jinguumae--Jinnan and Jinnan loops (as well as try to get pie). The other neighborhood memory-check run will be in out toward Aoyama, where I didn't manage to get to Viking F (bakery) last week, but it requires that I avoid overtime work. Other plans for the week will depend on what the cake shops put out to replace cakes retiring Jan 15.