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.

Les Cacaos: Madagascar

As my Saturday run, I tried a new place down in Higashigotanda, Shinagawa-ku (since Toni Coni is closed and F.O.B.S. is now open later on weekdays). It would be 8 km if I could follow a route, but ended up 10 km each way, for different reasons, at the fairly standard speeds of 11 km/h out and 10 km/h coming back.

The place, Les Cacaos, is actually a chocolate shop mostly, but they have a few cakes and related items. I took my chances with their chocolate mousse cake, which is a type I have a love-hate relationship with (they attract me, but often disappoint). In this case, it was the Madagascar (550 yen), which has red fruit gelatin inside, but nice gelatin/fruit and not a lot. The chocolate flavor was quite good and went with the fruit, so as far as chocolate mousse cakes go, this seemed excellent, especially giving the benefit of the doubt to the first cake, so I should go back next week and try the chocolate tart, for example. I should be able to get the distance down below 9 km each way, now that I'm more familiar with the area (if I'm patient enough to wait at the pedestrian signals).

Origines Cacao: Bacchus

As planned, I did not run this weekend. Instead, I baked a new cake recipe that I had been collecting ingredients for and did my first cycling for a long time. My knee seems to be okay for it.

The ride was out to Jiyugaoka to Origines Cacao to check whether they are "near-great" and ended up being about a 26 km round trip. I timed the first part was doing about 14 km/h, trying to go the equivalent of a walk as far as effort. It gives me a benchmark. Supposedly wind resistance makes speeding up on a bicycle more difficult for running, which I don't know how I'll handle, but I'm treating this as the equivalent of one-fourth the 7 km/h running distance, as far as my budget (I'm rescaling my budget to 7 km/h running from 6 km/h walking, though that information is not so useful to anyone else).

At Origines Cacao, I struggled to find something that looked good that I hadn't had, so I went with the promoted new one, Bacchus, for 594 yen, which is a chocolate cake with cognac and apricot. It's good, being layers of soft sponge with liquor and chocolate frosting, but maybe because chocolate layer cake is too much like what I've had plenty of in the US, it's not really so exciting. Sorry, it was so bright, I couldn't see what I was taking a picture of (and I forgot the shop again, as usual).

This is not the cake I'm looking for, so Origines Cacao goes back in the "excellent" list. That only leaves me five near-greats, whereas I wanted at least doubt the great, of which currently I have four, although if Dalloyau dropped a level, that would work out, so I keep working on the bottom of the near-greats until I get them up to where I want (half the number of cakes of the greats) before I try to update them.

At least the croissant from Au Bon Vieux Temps was excellent. They have delicious looking baked goods, but I don't think I've gotten anything before.

I also got another chocolate from Henri le Roux on Saturday, Madagascar: This was was excellent too.

Learned/got experience with a lot in my last cake attempt, Essor, I think it's called (I don't have the page with the real French name, just the phonetic Japanese). There was nothing that I did well, but I got the general idea about several parts. The result was pretty ugly, so no photos and I ate the evidence.

Essor has two layers of hazelnut biscuit, which was okay, but a little underdone because I used an upside-down tart form on top of a silicon mat because I don't have a 14.4 cm diameter round Flexipan (nor am I able to find out how I could get one, since even the company doesn't list that size, though it would probably would be about 5000 yen, which is more than I want to pay). For the (gelatin) hazelnut Bavarian cream disk, I completely failed to whipped up the cream, and splattered most of it around the kitchen: the new balloon whisk with the new mixer is proving difficult to use. However, it tasted good, and wasn't overly gummy (though would be different with more and proper whipped cream). This time I needed a 12.5 cm Flexipan (also unavailable), so I used a right-side-up one with some plastic wrap, which was a little leaky but worked well enough. The　(gelatin) orange concentrate and liquor layer, whose phonetic French name I can't figure out besides the orange part, really didn't like my substitute for the 12.5 cm Flexipan and broke into pieces when I tried to separate it from the form bottom (also, I had to boil down my first attempt and try again, as the gelatin and concentrate separated during freezing). This was gummy and too strong to sample by itself, but actually was fine in the cake, except for being ugly. Finally, I had to submerge/embed these layers in creme chocolat-blanc d'orange, again with a little gelatin; I tried chilling everything, but still had a splatter problem, so I did it by hand and didn't whip it enough (I don't really know what 6-minute whip looks like). The 15 cm ring form, which I did buy, leaked, but that might be due to the cream being too thin. It formed a solid cake okay and was good, though I'm not really that interested in cake that tastes that orange, so I won't be trying this again. I still have some orange concentrate, but maybe I'll use it and the liquor for macaron filling. Very educational, though. Now I just need to learn to whip cream, since it's half the next cake, Gateau Fraise.