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

Sunday was a big day for running and cake. First, after doing my indoor workout, I ran to Ginza Mitsukoshi and got both cakes for the cake-off; Mille Feuille Chocolat from Jean-Paul Hévin and Mont Blanc Jewel from Frédéric Cassel. This was a third-round cake-off between two one-and-one seasonal cakes (the JPH for just 2 weeks this time but probably FC's will stick around through Christmas, I would imagine, but I'm not sure).

For running, I made my fourth attempt at running the Daita--Daizawa--Hatagaya--Kamiyama-chou--Kitazawa--Motoyoyogi-chou--Nishihara--Ooyama-chou--Shouto--Tomigaya--Uehara loop from memory, which is about 22 km long, plus a few kilometers to get there and the few kilometers that I had already run to Ginza. On the way, I noticed that I was in the right time window and there wasn't a huge line at Haritts Donuts & Coffee in Uehara, so I stopped (and waited for a couple people ahead of me) and got, I think, the Choco Plain (Donut), which despite being plain, has sugar (but not icing) on it. This is a very lightly fried, very spongy donut, though not as course a sponge as a typical yeast donut and definitely an improvement on various other donut shops, but not so exciting that I need a return trip.

Despite haven't gotten more than half way the first three attempts and making another course change that I never done even in early bicycle attempts, I was able to do it clockwise. Real time was just over 3 hours, which isn't bad considering stops (the longest to wade through the crowd to get to a shop near Shimo-Kitazawa station and back to take a picture for a site on a future side loop). I'll probably try counterclockwise next weekend, since I have three days.

The cake-off was somewhat anticlimactic. Like the previous round with the Mont Blanc Jewel, I couldn't sense why I had originally put it on the list (probably because at the time it was a mont-blanc with most of the chestnut task masked by fruit), so the Mille Feuille Chocolat, which was definitely better, wins and the Mont Blanc Jewel gets demoted to semi-great, which is still a high rating. Not sure what new cakes next month will bring out, but if nothing else, I can do what might be the last third-round of two-time winners.