Pierre Gagnaire: Mont Blanc & Tarte aux Fraises

Ended the short (for me) week with a short, slow run (<10 km at 9 km/h) to the ANA Intercontinental Tokyo in Akasaka to get cake from Pierre Gagnaire. Company was coming, so I got two cakes, a Mont Blanc and a Tarte aux Fraises (600 yen each). Nothing unusual about the Mont Blanc, which seemed to be good quality and was excellent. The strawberry tart was also excellent, a very buttery tart, I think, and sweet.

Only ran about two-thirds the current base level this week, but just five days of running after missing a week from illness (and I'm a little off now) and really, I'm running enough that I don't really need to expand my week distance much further. My plan is to try a marathon-length run on Sunday for the first time in about a year, so resting up a little right before maybe is okay.

Homemade peach tart

Wanted to try a tart that was a butter tart (in this case, each parts butter and almond pieces) as the base. The plan was to pile the peaches on just one, but Japanese peaches are difficult (they stay stuck to the pit, and you have to just cut off pieces), so it was hard to get nice stackable pieces and I chickened out and spread them around (the filling was fairly fluid when added, so I was worried about overflow). One of the not full of peaches ones uses an oil crust and one uses butter (as in the full one). Not shown, when they cooled, I added apricot jam. The end result was okay but did not seem worth the trouble. I'm hoping that I like the oil crust okay (from my mom's recipe), because butter is a lot of work (not just to handle, but to obtain: butter shortage) and frankly it's nothing special. I can see now why some other tart shells add so much sugar, just to make it more interesting, but I'd rather find some other way to flavor it, if that's necessary. In this recipe, you back the crust first and then back and filling and the peach topping in it. This made the top part of the filling a little mushy from the peaches, which I should have expected but did not.