Cake-off: Frédéric Cassel's Breteuil over Paris S'éveille's Saint Honoré Caramel

Still working through seasonal cakes I want to get to for fourth-round cake offs, I first ran in light rain to Ginza Mitsukoshi, arriving two minutes before opening. They weren't that surprised to seem me as their first customer at Frédéric Cassel, which I got the Breteuil.

After getting it safely home, I ran down to Shibuya in what was now snow, because I'm really greedy and wanted to also compare pastries. I got the regular Croissant from Sadaharu Aoki, since the next stop was Paris S'éveille, which also has great pastries. It was the next step, but I didn't go the shortest way.

At PS (still snowing lightly all the way), having successfully timed it to arrive between the interval that Saint Honoré Caramels are brought out and when the sell out, I was able to get this three-time cake-off winner. For the pastry, I got Croissant Orange.

For a first of the new viennoiserie-off, I'm giving the win to Croissant Orange. It's no secret what appeals to me about both: sugar. The SA uses a syrup coating and PS uses powered sugar. But I'm giving the win to Croissant Orange, for what it's worth. Not sure that this is as useful as comparing great cakes, since the bar is really lower.

The main event, however is the cake-off. At least on this day and in this combination, the caramel of the Saint Honoré Caramel was more bitter than I wanted. Also, the nutty creamy decadence of the Breteuil could not be resisted. It's a little sad to think that I'll wait another year before I have this gain, but I did squeeze in two cake-offs with it this season, so even a four-time cake-off winner can't really ask for more.

I tagged this with neighborhood run, but then failed to include the night run. What I tried to do, as a new project this year, is do neighborhood course "clumps" (at least two loops and including all attached links with sites), but I failed both. I added a new site and split what's become the Yotsuya 3-choume Stn. southwest clump into a Samon-chou-Yotsuya loop, which I could do, and a Daikyou-chou--Shinanomachi loop, which I failed on when it came to matching on the east and west ends of the north stretch. I tried the remaining Shinjuku Gyouen clump, but failed on a link, which was not consistent with another link, so I revised them to all use the shortest path (versus favoring hugging close to Shinjuku Gyouen).