Ces Jours, Aroma [updated]

To change things up, I went back to hitting a shop on my quite great list, though I'm still adding new ones faster than I'm ticking off ones with three net cakes. There are a lot of local ones and ones I can hit weekdays, so maybe I'll do one next week, though I'm conflicted about hitting JPH again. Anyway, the long planned trip to Ces Jours was finally carried out. It was about a 70-minute each way.

I went for Aroma, as the type of cake I like, but it was a poor choice for transporting by bicycle. I'm skeptical about the design, though, as the top half is jell, with nothing keeping it on, so I'm not sure that a long return by train would have completely saved it. It's lychee, rose, and raspberry, well balanced. Inside is lychee comport, which works well. The texture is somewhat limited, but reasonable (the outside shell of the bottom gives a little crunch, I forget from what kind of nuts, so let's say pistachio, which would go with the flavor). This was definitely at least definitely good, but I was conflicted about whether it is excellent, based on what I perceive as its relative design flaws. In the end, I decided to just split the difference and call it semi-excellent, which isn't enough to keep it in the quite good shops, though it will be able to keep a position in the next lower rank (currently good), when I have to split it due to too many shops (its already 36 over the target 64 and I need to demote another 26 from quite good, but even including the latter, I don't have a full 64 that are obviously above the minimum and get second cakes from the just good shops with one cake isn't going to be a project I'm going to start any time soon). Still, it's been a little over 3 years since I've been there anyway, and with 3 cakes, don't to have need to visit them again: just too many shops in Tokyo.