Dixans (de Bon Coeur): Gateau Pistache Fraise

Made the mistake of going to Dixans, which is a café that turns out to be part of the (P.) de Bon Coeur group: poor research on my part. The cake is tagged as from P. de Bon Coeur, and the bag has that name on one side and Le Coffret Coeur on the other. Still, de Bon Coeur's cake is not bad, although today's Gateau Pistache Fraise, for 690 yen, was close. Setting aside the high price, the this was too gelatinous, although not by a lot. Also, very weak taste, which is perhaps why the pistachio was completely not harmonizing with the strawberry. This was a waste of food/calories, so I'm tempted to call it bad, but it was not necessarily incompetent, so maybe someone would like this, but this will keep me away from these shops for a long time.

De Bon Coeur: Passion Mousse Chocolat

Tonight, despite cooling off more than I had hoped and a somewhat strong wind, I did my longest round trip workday with cake (I say without checking the previous hundreds of entries). I went to De Bon Coeur, in Shinagawa, which you get to going south of Meguro Station (if you want to go to Meguro, you need to go west: the station is in Shinagawa, whereas Shinagawa Station is in Minato-ku, which doesn't need a station because it's in the middle). It took me 9 km out, slightly slow, and 8.8 km back very slow, with a little rain and carrying a Passion Mousse Chocolat, which I got for 691 yen.

The run and route is okay, mostly familiar, along a history & culture route for much of the last stretch.


The cake is a fairly solid mousse (which is I suppose good, since I ran it almost 9 km and a gelatin-less mousse would just puddle with that much vibration, maybe). I have to wonder if there is cheese in it (didn't read the card that thoroughly, as usual), just because that seems to be a general specialty, or it's just gelatinous for the usual reasons. The chocolate is coating on the outside, some mousse in the middle and some cake on the bottom. The passion fruit is just the small section on the right. Note sure what the large white section is, since there is no taste, which is why I wonder if it is cheese. The is good, as far as being good quality and not bad tasting, but no better, so I'll switch the rating of the shop to "Good?" on the map and look at other potentially excellent shops that I've had less than two cakes blogged from.

39 km loop:

Tried just dipping into Kanagawa pref., looking to see whether I should expand again outside of Tokyo. The detour at Shibuya Sta. was was much more than I intended, although I liked the south part of it and should use that again. Shibuya is not just runner friendly, which is why I don't usually go there for cake. Since I'm not trying to find the shortest route, I should stick to detouring around it more fully.

WIth the detour, the run to Bigarreaux was about 13 km, which took an acceptable 80 minutes. Because I was doing a loop stopping for cake and exploring new roads, I was not trying to do maximum speed, although I still tried to time myself, to stay motivated. Total was about 39 km at the same pace (4 hours total), although I was definitely slow at the end. For a faster run, I need less stuff in my backpack or no backpack. It's more a problem of bulk making it press against my back than weight. I could wear the jacket (I'm still running in my same super cool UV protection shirt, although I get watery eyes rather than so much sweat. No special skin problems except for burning eyes and dried out feet). At least for today, my back was the weak link for increasing my speed.

At Bigarreaux, they've got three autumn cakes out, so I'll need to get back there again. This time, I got the Misérable for 500 yen. This is said to be a traditional Belgian cake of fermented butter cream sandwiched between high-almond-content cake. It's not that sweet, but, as you can see, that's a lot of butter. It's the kind of thing that I like very much, for variety, but can't really say that it is great. Would definitely like to have it again.

So, the entrance to Kanagawa is still not my favorite, although I was not the only runner or cyclist on the two-lane road on the Kanagawa side coming from Futakotamagawa, and it was okay, as far as I went on it. I liked the canal route that I took for the south end of the run. Google is wrong about the need to detour to cross the big expressway: there are crosswalks and lights right at the canal roads. My problem was getting off and making my way back to Tokyo. So I can use the canal route to move east-west (if I don't need to be very deep in Kanagawa), but I still need to find a good entrance point and initial road.

Coming back, I stopped by (Patisserie) de Bon Coeur in Koyama (Shinagawa dist.). They have a cafe downstairs, I think, but there is a regular moderately sized adult, fancy cake counter. I got the Gateau Pistache (guessed spelling) for 648 yen. This is pistacio and raspberries. Fairly standard cake. It was very good. Can't say that it reached great, but there's a lot of competition in this category, so it's hard to stand out. There are several parks around and it's close to one of the History and Culture Walking Courses, so maybe I'll get back there again, but I'm not going to make it a priority. I have enough other places to keep me interested. I'll update the map to reflect that I've been there.