Cycled to Au Bon Vieux Temps in Oyamadai again and got two cakes, which was a mistake. I did multiple cakes by myself early on, justifying it with the exercise, but it's too much. I tried to think carefully in choosing, since I don't expect everything from even near-great places to be to my liking, but I've had their regulars already and I'm not that thrilled by their fancy little fruit tarts. As it turns out, I choose two very similar things, but I think I've had another similar thing to both of these before, but apparently not recently enough to post on it, because I can't find any other mention of chocolate mousse (which they use in a lot of things) and raspberry. These were 648 yen each, so also more than I originally planned to spend. Didn't see their little potato-shaped one for 300 yen this time.
The cakes were La France, which is a mousse cube bounded by a thin layer of solid chocolate under a layer of raspberry jelly, with some more raspberry chocolate filling in the middle. There is also a little solid chocolate cup on top filled with raspberry sauce, which I was surprised was not spilled by a couple kilometers by bicycle to get to a park. This was excellent. The solid chocolate is a good choice to avoid having just a gummy raspberry layer, although, of course, it breaks into pieces when you eat it.
The other cake was a block of chocolate mousse with thin layers of raspberry on top of a layer of what, phonetically, was written li/ri oh le/re, which I did not recognize as the French "riz au lait", which of course means rice pudding (in this case, baked, or at least allowed to set up solid). The raspberry and mousse were essentially the same as the other cake, and were good. The rice pudding was supposed to be flavored with jasmine, though even trying to eat alone, I couldn't detect anything. It was okay at the time, although not really useful except as a base, but the after-texture, if there is such the thing, I did not like (rubbery pieces of rice pudding rice grain pieces in nooks of my mouth). Still it was not bad, but I'll try to avoid such rice pudding based cakes in the future. Still, with one excellent cake to partially balance things out, I'll keep treating them as a near-great shop and eventually get back there for a 12th cake, though I'll need several cakes from various other great and near-great places before I'll ready to do that.
Posts
Tried this month's Pierre Hermé feature flavor which is Mogador, which is pineapple and passion fruit. This week I decided to try the cake of the same name, which has a several millimeter layer of roast pineapple and passion fruit chocolate ganache, milk chocolate, and whipped cream, I think. Unfortunately, it's not any better than it sounds and this one you definitely need to put on it's side to cut, because the hard parts are solid and there are soft parts. It's still good, as I can't fault it for being as advertised, but I think I'll take advantage of the other Fraise cakes next week.
