Pièce Montée, Mont-Blanc

Getting to the last of the quite fine shops with only two cakes, I ran to Pièce Montée in Ginza. The selection is small, maybe only the few cakes shown online. I went with the Mont-Blanc. It's is small and not cheap, but that is what I expect for the neighborhood (though it's not that far to the nearest Mr. Donut, which is under an overpass on the Ginza border). I toured shops in Marunouchi and did not find anything I needed to get back to. Tomorrow I expect to visit Mitsukoshi, so I left that and Ginza 6 for then.

At more than an hour after starting, I was in Hibiya Park, having doubled back from Shin-Marunouchi Building rather than completing the loop around the imperial grounds. I was hungry so I need to decide whether I would try to eat cake outside, always difficult, to just have energy cookies. I went for the cake and was glad I did. First of all, it was loose in the box, so I don't know kind of shape it would have been if I had run it home, though it was going good for about 30 minutes of walking, mostly in tunnels. The chestnut paste was well sprinkled with sugar, so it wasn't too bitter for me, but the cream inside was also not just plain cream. Even in the dark, it was obviously brown. There wasn't really a chocolate taste, at least combined with the chestnut, so maybe it was also flavored with chestnuts. I'll ask next time I go. The base was meringue, but I just had to eat that last by itself. I'll be going back because I decided that, simple as it was, it was perfect as itself, so great cake. Terrible picture, so I think I'll keep it off Twitter.

Left hip started hurting again after about 10 km. Hope that's not going to stay a thing.

As I review, I miscounted before and I have 50 quite fine shops, compared to a target of 32, which means 18 of them are actually just fine, leaving only 46 shops for the current fine shop list, which is up to 111. That's a probably for a different year, though if I get enough new shops that are reasonably good, I could start shifting those down to just other visited shops.