Cake-off: Jean-Paul Hévin's Guayaquil over Ladurée's Plaisir Sucré

Sunday morning I definitely ran, and not to a cake shop, or at least not to get cake. The neighborhood course run part was the revised Central Jinguumae clump, which steals the Jinguumae north loop from a different clump and combines it with the new Jinguumae--Kita-Aoyama north loop, which combines three loops. I was successful at the clump and doing the new loop clockwise. In the middle of the run, I check Viron and B-E to confirm that they did not have cakes that I wanted even near opening time, which they didn't. Had other plans for Sunday and ended up being lazy in the evening and not running in the cold.

I did get one food item from a neighborhood course site (I'm working my way through that new Jinguumae-Kita-Aoyama loop, though they are adding new places faster than I'm getting to them, as well as closing them): Aomori Ringo Apple Pie from Ueshima Coffee Shop, which was fairly robust to call a pastry, but it was good enough. They also have fresh scones.

Monday was a total wash, with late work and still very cold, so I opted for an early bed and early run Tuesday morning, which is a holiday. This was a 1.5 hour run that first tried to do the Suga Shrine clump, which is the base clump. I failed at the clump but did revised the main loop clockwise successfully. However, I spotted, where I was lazy in the past and let myself pass a temple on the opposite side of a two-lane divided road and have since revised the whole clump. I was able to merge loops down 2 loops from 4 loops by leaving a tiny loop for the named shrine and a short link from the main loop, which circles it. After finishing the soon to be revised old main loop, I went to Mitsukoshi at Ginza for cake for a cake-off. I didn't get through all the third-round cake-offs last year, so I'm trying to pick up some now between the highest priority (great cakes with at least 2 wins) fourth-round cake-offs. I did a recent addition, Plaisir Sucré from Ladurée, because it's a February cake (based on when I first bought it), though it doesn't really have a season, and Guayaquil from Jean-Paul Hévin, because it's the earliest among the one-and-one great cakes.

Plaisir Sucré has great texture, with both crunch and thick nutty biscuit base, and a sweet smooth taste. However, I have to give the win to JPH, because Guayaquil is the perfect chocolate layer cake, at least today.