En Vedette, Tarte Fraise

Thursday, I made the last visit to bring En Vedette up to enough cakes to promote them to the exceptional list. Previous cakes were good enough that were was no chance of them failing to be promoted. Remaining choices of new cakes were 3 strawberry cakes and a unique-looking mont-blanc. Though I'd like to the try the mont-blanc, I figured one of the strawberry cakes deserved a try, so I went with the Tarte Fraise, which is pistachio. I appreciated strawberry and pistachio in a number of cakes, so it was perhaps the safest choice none the less. And it was definitely excellent. The interesting point is perhaps the tart, which was relatively soft for a tart but more like a butter/nut tart than, for example, a dacquoise. Very nice.

Since it was on the way, I tried to do the Takeshita clump of my neighborhood running course, but failed completely to make the correct turn on the revised Jinguumae northwest loop. In the usual spirit of sour grapes, I found one new site for the map (Sweets Paradise [Harajuku]), which nullified the previous loop. Actually, I'm going to have to split the loop to cover more of Shitatake Street (which is I'd actually like to avoid as much as a possible). Maybe next week when I'm running southwest, I'll try the clump with the two new loops again.

No running Friday, as I was busy, but I swung by the the Sadaharu Aoki counter at Isetan (which Sadaharu Aoki himself of signing, but I didn't buy that high level an item), and got a baked sweet: Cake au Chocolat Pistache. It's small, but excellent, as far as baked sweets go, versus fresh cakes. Hoping they'll have more fresh cakes, but I also wouldn't mind trying the matcha version.