Ease/Repos, Nut, Dried Fruit, and Caramel Tart

Not that I was in a hurry, just I wanted to know how it was before this weekend Repos, so I sent to Isetan a lunch time and got a cake from the new counter, Repos (by P. Ease). It's pretty pricy and away from my usual tastes, so I momentarily gave up but after looking at the visiting counter of the week (a fine shop) and not finding information about when Repos might leave (though they replaced a shop that was there maybe 6 months?), I reconsidered and got the  Nut, Dried Fruit, and Caramel Tart, which was relatively reasonable (nothing exotic or seasonal in it) and looked promising. As the name states, it's a tart, specifically an almond cream tart, on top of which is a crème mousseline of custard, butter cream, and pistachio paste with bittersweet caramel. The topping is nuts (walnuts, almonds, pistachios, and cashews) and dried fruit (raisons and cranberries). Definitely hots of things I like in a substantial tart, so no surprise that I thought it definitely excellent. The name they put on top of the each is Ease. I assume they want to differential the location names because the offerings are different, but they have a pretty big space, offering various bake goods besides the fresh cakes. I should definitely get back there for a second cake earlier rather than latter when it comes time to go in for second cakes from shops that had at least good cakes.

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.