Ginza walk: Dalloyau, Narutokintoki Murasaki Tart

Been a while. I was confirming that Tokyo is the best place for cake. Did some long slow walking there (16.6 at about 4.5 km/h), but today the first half averaged above 6.5 km/h. I'm going to drop keeping track of half-kilometers/hour speeds at the next update of my chart to track my running budget, probably when my average exceeds 6.5 km/h in general for a total of 9.2 km both ways (skipping a lot of shopping walking).

Frédéric Cassel's last announced special (not the monthly) was not visible there at 5 pm on Monday. I suspect that normal specials only past until Sunday or they run out of ingredients, not sure which. Anyway, Aux Bacchanales is close and is the highest priority of the near-greats that I'm going to set (because I've only blogged 4 cakes), so I thought I'd get a head start on catching them up, but it turns out they gave up on patisserie stuff in June. Too bad, because they had a couple cakes I really liked. Ended up going back to Dalloyau and got the Nautokintoki Muraski Tart, which is a seasonal sweet potato tart for 324 yen. I don't think Nautokintoki is normally purple and there were non-purple chunks inside, so I suspect the purple part is normal Japanese sweet potato, not the Narutokintoki. It's nice for a change and as sweet potato tarts go, I'll say it's excellent.

Potager: Garland Chrysanthemum Opera

Today I ran a good distance and actually got cake on a weekday for the first time together in more than a month.

The 0.8 km, my chronometer was not running. The next stretch was 5.6 km, which I did in a fast 32'10'', 5.74 min/km, so I'll estimate that the part I missed was only moderately paced, since although I was trying to run the same, it also amounted to my warm-up. Coming back was a slightly different route from Nakameguro Station up to Old Yamanote Road. the Routed ended up being 6.7 km and took 41'41'', which is a slow 6.22 min/km, but then I was carrying cake, tired, and going more uphill. Actually, I was very tired after running after a long day at work. Had forgotten what that was like.

The Garland Chrysanthemum Opera, for 500 yen, is what it sounds like, except that they use sweet potatoes where another cake would use cream cheese, for example. I can't say that I could really tell what chrysanthemum tastes like from it. It is a good cake, but not exciting. I like Potager, but I'd rather have richer cakes, as long as my health can support them, so I'll designate them as "Good" and focus on other shops. I make sure that I eat a lot of vegetable with my meals: today dinner was a Chinese cabage and broiled kabocha (basically, pumpkin) salad with kabocha, zucchini, and marinated (?) tofu pizza (with mozzarella cheese and Indian tomato sauce, as usual).

That said, I think I'll try making use of the known shops who come to Isetan that I have not blogged about. They are all places that I have not been to for a year and don't really remember much about them, so there might be some excellent one's among them that I don't know about. For those who don't come to me, I can wait until I get 9 items from the great shops and 3 items from the worthy shops before I worry about getting at least one cake posted from each good shop.