Frédéric Cassel, Mille Crêpes Potiron

The last of the cakes on Sunday was from Frédéric Cassel and catches me up with new cakes from them with still two weeks to go until the next month. This is Mille Crêpes Potiron, which has several things going against it. One, is I don't appreciate crêpes, at all, though my biggest exposure is milk crêpe, which makes rollcake look sophisticated, by my estimation, though actually stacking crêpes is does seem more technically difficult. The other is pumpkin (or at leas squash) as a cake flavor. Lastly, decoration cakes, even from good shops often sacrifice the eating experience for appearance. On the other hand, Frédéric Cassel has a good track record for taking types of cakes I've dismissed and impressing me. Also, this is not milk, it's rum and raisin, along with the pumpkin and the ever present FC staple mascarpone cheese (a neutral texture and taste medium for whatever you want to do). As it happens, this was the best of the cakes I had, and definitely good, which certainly puts it at the top of crêpe-based cakes and would make be consider future cakes, though I'll try to stay clear of milk-flavored, really in any kind of cake.

 

[Fri] Pierre Hermé: Tarte au Potiron

Starting with the cake (which I did, but only the buying part, not the eating part), I got the Tarte au Potiron from Pierre Hermé at Shinjuku Isetan. This is the seasonal cake that is not part of the chestnut and pear theme set.

This is a pumpkin tart with a "tuile", which is French for "tile", but seems like brittle, in this case pumpkin seed brittle, though it could have nuts or something in it to balance it, since at least it was not all whole obvious pumpkins seeds, but just a few. I started on the just pumpkin part and thought, "yup, that's pumpkin", which I've been a fan of as in pumpkin pie. Mixing in a little tuile, though, great balance and this was an excellent tart. Even after the tuile ran out, I was either used to it or had enough sweet aftertaste that it was not too strong a pumpkin for me and was till excellent.

On the running, I'm working on a new ~15 km neighborhood map, as other days, but I still did not get very far without making mistakes and realized that I should add another patisserie, even though I've not blogged it yet (because it's more cafe and somewhere that really needs a recommendation, though I'm probably get around to them eventually), so I cut off the run at 1 hr, which I estimate was 8.5 km. I've learned always to use Runtastic (which I didn't), because even when I'm trying to run a course that I already have an exact measurement for, as likely as not, I've going to get off course. At least this time I backed up and found the correct course each time (and a church that I had forgotten about), so I hope next time goes more smoothly. Today I figured out how to expand the current map considerably without breaking the run of no stops for lights, but I think that'll wait to learn the current map first before I add the next several kilometers or more.