Ryoura, Récif

Sunday as a big cake and running day. First, I did the run out to Ryoura. I stopped at Hikarie to check Sadaharu Aoki, but it seems to be one of the shops closed during a 1.5-month renovation. Next, I went to Viron and got their Bostock aux Pistaches, which I decided was excellent, though I'm not convinced that pistachios, much less with cherry, are an improvement.

At Ryoura, I decided that chocolate was a dependable choice (plus, I've had most of their line-up), so I went with the Récif, which I hadn't seen before. This is chocolate and whipped cream, with oat and currant sablé and cacao-scented blancmange, which sounds a little weird perhaps, but the taste was a definitely good chocolate cake, but it didn't really stand out. Maybe the interesting ingredients actually cancelled each other out. I'll included the double picture and split up the post, since I don't have enough space for all the labels.

Went out about noon, which is about right to visit L'Atelier Motozo, since they don't open until 1 pm (staffing problems). On the way, I checked out some potential sites on the Jinguumae--Kita-Aoyama--Shibuya loop. The neighborhood is a maze and the current loop violates my general rules in a couple place, so in adding a Starbucks, I noticed some other cafés that seemed to require that I split up this loop and made three tentative new loops, one for east of Omotesandou Station, one for the southern part of Cat Road, and one circling the UN university. At least one current shop had disappeared and I found more cafés, so the loops still aren't stable. Also, I'm considering adding a couple more chain coffee shops, though I also ruled one out (it was more like a restaurant than a café).

I also worked on reviewing some current very minor loops and did them clockwise: the Shibuya east loop, Dougenzaka loop, and Sakuragaoka-chou loop. Then I finally made I way down to L'Atelier Motozo a little before 2 pm. Eating in requires ordering a drink, so I got take-out. It took longer to get home than I liked, maybe 10 minutes over the hour I told them, so I'm not sure whether the center of the cake would have been more solid if I had been faster, though I did give it about an hour in the refrigerator. This shop does Italian deserts, so not my usual style. I went with Fiore Fata, which they mark as "original", versus the mostly traditional deserts, at least in name. This is  blancmange, cherry sauce, cranberry syrup, inside of pistachio mousse, which is wrapped in an herb spongy cake. Can't say that I need more blancmange in my cakes, but this was fine as filler and the cherry and cranberry harmonized well so the fruit taste was better than I would usually expect from either separately and that fruit went well with the pistachio. That much was good, but wrapping it in the herb cake sent this into excellent territory. So this shop too will remain the the quite fine shop list. Not sure that I'm going to be able to slim this list down to the desired 32 shops. Not even sure I can get it down to few enough shops that I could cut the bottom of the list below and get two ranks of shops totally around 96 cakes. Well, there's always the next big cut when I go for having sampled 4 cakes from each in this one and 2 from the one below. That shouldn't take more than a few more years.

Completely forgot to talk about the running. It was misty rain almost the whole way, which looks like the best I can expect for the next week. Total, I was out about three hours, though there were obviously some stopped for popping in shops and taking a few photos. It had been three days since my last run, so this time I included 9 intervals of 4 minutes of running, so I'm still taking it easy but starting to build up. I'm running long enough that I could do a local training run without walking and cover some regular loops.