Lenôtre, Plaisir

Was busy Sunday and most of Monday, but Monday afternoon went to Jean-Paul Hévin, since the cake I wanted from Sadaharu Aoki was sold out at Marunouchi and I needed someplace for two to test. We got hot Chocolate (Chocolat Chaud Mangue and Viennois), which is relatively cheap there, and two macarons, Frambois'in (not sure what the "'in" concatenates from) and Mésange. The first hot chocolate is mango, obvious, and wasn't anything special, though good of course, and the second is whipped cream, which also was nothing special but good. I liked the Macaron Mésange most. This is passion fruit and matcha and was excellent. The Frambois'in was raspberry and Venezuelan chocolate and was good but not exciting.

I hadn't had cake Sunday and I was already at Yuuraku-cho, so I got a third cake from Lenôtre, Plaisir, which seems like a Saint-Marc from the components (milk chocolate and vanilla mousse), but isn't. For running, I ran down to Akasaka again (like Saturday morning) and tried to do the revised Akasaka loop that split off all the stuff south of Roppongi-Doori, and a little on the Akasaka 2 side and I was successful, but realized afterward that I didn't like that the route doubled back where it could have gone around the block, so it was a failure of route making. I finish practicing Akasaka 4, doing it counterclockwise, and did the new Akasaka 3 east loop clockwise, so I had to be satisfied with that.

Plaisir is nice and well made, but definitely not a Saint-Marc and ultimately, though it's definitely good, I can't rate it higher, as it's just not that exciting. Still, with two great cakes before this, Lenôtre easily is a top the quite fine category and is challenging the quite exceptional one, so I'll be back there again early next week, regardless. Also, I need to find another great cake, quick, but I should get to that later as I catch up with this week.

Michalak, Mangue

Needed to go to Isetan today, which is why I didn't go yesterday. Michalak has a new cake and I owe them for a cake-off. The cake is Mangue, which is one of those fruit-shaped cakes that I've heard a popular among young pastry chefs, where it's made to taste like a cake version of the fruit (versus cake in the same shape that includes the fruit as a taste). I don't want all my cakes like this, but I now see the appeal. Definitely excellent.

I decided that it would be foolish to try the Akasaka--etc. run again today, since really yesterday was about as long as I've run lately, and the real course takes a little more. Instead, I did a food shopping runs by bicycle after bringing home the cake, which ended up taking longer than I expected, since my first stop turned out to be closed for reasons I didn't bother to read in detail about on the sign, so I ended up going to a branch on the other side of home, as well as stopping a couple other places, so it took about 1.75 hours, leading me to give up also on doing an indoor work out. Stocked up on roasted peanuts, crackers, sesame seeds, energy cookies, vegetables, canned fish, and got one cheap chocolate bar, which I haven't tried yet.

Yesterday and noticed and today I confirmed that the Akasaka Del'Imo closed (moving to Tokyo Midtown Hibiya). It doesn't really matter for the course, since there are other sites on the same street, but it inspired me to revised the big Akasaka loop and cut off one site to its own loop (dubbed the Akasaka 4 loop) and reroute the main loop to be more direct and take over the sites for the Akasaka 3 loop. I'll have to recalculate distances for everything west of there, but it shortens the loop somewhat, despite increasing the total number of sites on it, so it seems like a legitimate change, even if it was probably inspired by yesterday's failure (if you're losing the game, change the rules).