Cake-off: Jean-Paul Hévin's Bergamot over Frédéric Cassel's Mille-feuille Finger Kaki

Saturday, was no running, but I did get to a café on my neighborhood running map, Janat in Jinguumae, south of Omotesandou road and had lunch with tea and cake. The cake doesn't really count as fresh cake, but rather is the hard cake served with sauce or whipped cream common in café. Pyramide Aztèque, which is chocolate with roasted bananas. It was good, which is better than it might have been, but it didn't convince me that bananas are a great idea.

The other cake is called Madagascar, and was the cake of the day, so cheap with lunch. I had last than half of this one, but thought it excellent. It's vanilla. The caramel sauce with peanuts was a good complement to this dessert inspired by a traditional cake.



As the year comes to a close, I'm trying to fit in more cake-offs. Sunday's was to squeeze in Cake-off: Jean-Paul Hévin's Bergamot, which is seasonal, so it might end Friday. I had planned to wait until Wednesday, but we were buying cake at JPH anyway, so I got the Bergamot and then, when I ran, did a short run over to Frédéric Cassel and home for the Mille-feuille Finger Kaki so I could do a second round. Still enjoying the mille-feuille, but JPH's standard design applied to orange definitely suits me, so it gets its first win.

Monday, I tried running down to Hiroo by the long way along my neighborhood course as a one-way to officially add/update some loops, but it was mostly a fail, not because I couldn't run but because my planned route was flawed. I picked up some information, though, so it's all good, though it took a couple hours. I didn't get cake, but went to Isetan to get a pastry from Arcachon, who visited until Tuesday. All that was on offer was a couple baked tarts, so I got the Tarte Agrume which is the greater citrus family, though it also featured pistachio. It was definitely good, but my interest in these types of tarts is limited.

Arcachon: Puuruka

Keeping close to home and avoiding straining my knee (which I'll keep doing for another week and a half), I got a third cake from Arcachon. This one didn't work out so well. I wrote down "Puuruka", which was 480 yen. I let the nuts on top convince me. It's also got white, milk, and dark chocolate mousses, strawberry gelatin, and probably pistachio base. Even getting it home fairly quickly with 2 cold packs in the box, which I kept a while in the refrigerator, the base was still not firm enough to support it. It was not really well constructed and the flavors don't really add up to anything, so I'm going to have to say that it was just okay.

In fairness, I put carob powder in my cheesecake filling, which worked okay, which is to say, never do this, or at least not if you don't know what you're doing.

Arcachon: Rose Pink

I kept things simple and went back to Arcachon at Isetan and got the Rose Pink (I think) for 540 yen. This is strawberry as the outer coating (just a couple millimeters) with the inside mascarpone cheese. I choose this just as the first cake in the lineup (although there are things I would have skipped with this strategy) and it is not something I would expect to be in the mood for, but actually it worked out well. It's not exciting again, but it was excellent for what it was, with the strawberry not too strong, and actually left me quite satisfied (and very full, since I ate it after lunch).

Arcachon: Equinox

Got my cake from Isetan again today, from the visiting shop, Arcachon. It was Equinox, for 500 yen, and seems to be tea cream inside chocolate mousse with a raspberry and mini blueberry macaron on top. Now, I thought there was blueberry inside, and maybe there was a subtle amount in the chocolate, but I'll need to go back to find out, which I intended to do because I've decided, partially from giving them the benefit of the doubt, that this was excellent. It's tiny, which is fine, put it puts some of the excellent shops in perspective, because they hold their cake sizes and just raise their prices as ingredient costs go up.

In other news, I've gone almost all the way with a cake recipe from my (the library's really) Super Patissier Book for "cake/batter/biscuit" (it's hard to translate "kiji" into English), which is by the Salon de thé Cerisier guy, where I've never been. There is some overlap between this and the SPB dictionary of "batter/cake", which is available in bookstores.

The first recipe, which was not the first I tried parts of, is the Marjolaine, which has a Japonaismasse (which is German) biscuit as the cake layers, between which it has ganache, creme praline, and creme chantilly. I don't do the creme chantilly for the top or the fancy decoration.

The biscuit is in the proportions 600 g egg white, 600 g granulated sugar, "appropriate" vanilla essence (so I skip, because I don't know, have, or care so much), 500 g hazelnut powder, 100 g of (not bread) flour and 200 g of powdered sugar. From my previous experience, I also add powdered egg white with the granulated sugar, because I can't make meringue without it. All the cakes in the beginning are nut-based biscuits as the cake theme. This makes 4 30-by-40 cm pans, which is 27 pieces of cake final 4-layer cake. For one 14 cm round tart form, which is what I've used, I only need 3% (18 g) of the base recipe, so one large egg is enough for two, and I can cut one in half, although I'd really like to get a fourth form and make all four layers together. Really, you are supposed to cut after you assemble and freeze.

As I was saying, you make a meringue with the egg white and graduated sugar (plus 5-15% of egg white power by weight of egg white, depending on the season) and whip it until the peaks just bend a little before cutting in the other ingredients, which should be sifted (I've got two sifters now, a big one for flour and powdered sugar and a tiny with big homes for nut powders). Then I spread it carefully in oil-sprayed and bread-floured 14 cm tart forms and bake for 30 minutes at 170 deg C in my convection oven (the recipe says 180 deg C, which is edible, but seems overly burnt, but the normal -10 deg C for a convention oven seems to work out).

The ganache for this is 150 g milk, which you boil (which seems extreme, but this is pretty much my first experience with ganache) and then add 300 g of 66% cacao chocolate and then 45 g of rum. For the creme praline, you need 600 g 38% fat cream and 200 g praline almonde (the paste). You combine and whip 7 minutes (or maybe the Japanese means seven-tenths), which means until paste-like. For the creme chantilly, you also need 600 g of 38 % fat cream and 40 g of granulated sugar and otherwise do the same thing. If you made topping, you would need another 150 g of 45% cream and 21 g of granulated sugar and do the same thing, plus some red food coloring and chocolate powder or something. The cake is assembled bottom to top, biscuit, filling, biscuit, filling, ..., so it gets thicker but lighter as you go up; but I couldn't pile the creme praline that high, so that's the one thing I left over of. Actually, I made extra fillings for the first try, so all the fillings were at refrigerator temperature this time, which is not actually part of the recipe. I'm thinking I'm put the creme praline in the freezer next time for long enough to get it thick enough to support the top two layers.

As a said at the beginning, after assembling, you put it in the freezer to harden before cutting, and of course, before eating. The first time, I just cut one biscuit disk into fourths, but this time I cut two disks into halves, so I'll try to actually cut that into two little pieces when it's ready. I'm not ready to take a picture.