Jun Honma: Bois de la Cambre/Cambre no Mori

Hitting a maybe quite good shop that's come back into consideration now that I'm penalizing shops less for less than excellent cakes (this is the third and the second was just ok), focusing on the potential for great cakes (which the first one seemed at the time, but I've never seen it since). I went for Cambre no Mori (or Bois de la Cambre, depending on how much of the Japanese you want to translate into French), name for the Belgian park. My reasoning was that the cake that I liked from them had orange and this looked solid enough to travel well by bicycle, which it certainly was. It's a chocolate on top of an orange tart. Actually, it's pretty much chocolate fudge to the point of the chocolate being slightly grainy, presumably from sugar crystals, which is a new experience for me in Japan. This seems like it wouldn't be out of place in a family restaurant or dinner, and it would be a pretty good choice, because it's good at what it does, but it's amazingly crude in aims for a patisserie cake, so I sort of just have to shake my head at it and laugh. It seems very mom and pop's style, but actually this is a branch shop of a shop further along the same train line, and they also have a workshop a little south, so it's all by design. As I said, it was good, and I can laugh at it, so I'm not disappointed really. It's fun to have something from a different kind of shop, but definitely not the kind of shop I'm usually look for, since I'd like something more sophisticated (especially at regular patisserie prices).