Tompoes

Our Tompoes of today

I like to bake.

And I like it way too much. 

I'd probably really skinny if I'd skip the baking hobby. 

And today, restday, we (Dennis and I) made Tompoes. 

Dennis told me he'd once a week go to the HEMA with his pocket money (the money he got from his mum to buy school-milk every day) to buy a Tompoes. 

Tompoes means Tom-cat it is, literary translated. A known comic character, Tom Puss (Tom Poes in Dutch) is even named after the pastry.

Tom Poes and Heer Bommel

The pastry looks a little like the French mille-feulle but is far tastier to my opinion. 

They say the Tompoes has been made first by a bakery/patisserie in Amsterdam. The baker was inspired by the figure of General Tom Thumb. 

A little man (Charles Sherwoon Stratton) was one of the big attractions from the American circus of Phineas Taylor Barnum. In 1844 and 1845 the circus traveled through the Netherlands. A couple years later a Frysian little man traveled around as well, inspired by Charles. The little man called himself 'Admiraal Tom Pouce' > General Tom Thumb.

Advertisement of General Tom Pouce on tour

Both Tom Thumb and Tom Pouce refer to the same fairytale figure. 

The French version mille-feulle is also called a 'Napoleon' after the rather small postured French emperror. Both Tompoes and mille-feulle probably have the same history but as far as I know it's not really known which pastery was first. 

In my grandmothers recipe book I couldn't find the recipe but how to make every separate part was still in there. And it's not too difficult. Even Dennis can make it ;)

So here the recipe. And for the ones who speak Dutch/Flemmish here a good little video on how to make it: 

http://www.een.be/programmas/dagelijkse-kost/recepten/tompoes

Ingredients

Pudding
- 1 L milk
- 1 or 2 egg yokes > keep the egg-whites to make 6-8 meringues later on (125g powder sugar, egg-whites, stir till stiff, bake on 125 C for one hour)
- 180 g sugar
- 40 g Maizena (corn starch)
- 30 g flour
- or 60 g of custard instead of the Maizena and flour
- bit of vanilla, vanilla essence or vanilla sugar 

Dough
- 1 sheet of puff pastry (French pastry) (you can buy this in the supermarket, often frozen)

Icing
- 150 g powder sugar
- 12 ml milk (tablespoon)

The whole process takes at about 70 minutes.

1. Pudding.

Slowly heat up the milk just before boiling point. Add the vanilla to the milk.

Stir the other ingredients for the pudding in a kitchen-aid. I just did it by hand, but a kitchen-aid is faster.
Start with mixing the egg-yokes. Add the sugar and make a fluffy dough out of it. Now add the Maizena and flour.
Add a little of the warm vanilla-milk to the mixture and blend well.
Pour the mixture to the rest of the warm milk and stir continuously. Heat the mixture slowly but don't let it boil. When the first air bubbles pop up the mixture should be firm enough.

Put the mixture in a plastic bag and totally close the bag air tight (this will be your pastry-bag later on). Closing the bag avoids the mixture getting a 'skin' (sheet).
Put the bag in the fridge to let it cool.

2. Dough.

Roll out the puff-pastry and cut the dough in two. Bake the dough on a plate on 170C (use baking paper). To avoid the dough to raise and bubble up put a scale on top of the dough. The baking takes at about 30 minutes depending on your oven.
After baking you can cut the pastry in small blocks, rectangles or whatever you like.

3. Icing

Stir the sugar and milk to a thick shiny mixture.

4. Tompoes

Cut a 1cm corner off one of the corners of the plastic-bag. Now you can squeeze the pudding onto the bottom layer of the pastry-squares (or whatever shape you made them). Squeeze at about 2-3cm thick layers onto the pastry.
Put the other dough layer on top of the pudding and spread out the icing on top.

On Kings-day and when the national soccer team plays many bakeries sell the Tompoes with an orange coloured icing (orange is the Dutch national colour, in case you didn't knew...)
But most of the times the icing is made pink.
You can use berry juice instead of milk (like strawberry) to make the icing pink.

*Pink, yet another Dutch word...*

The pastry is often served during tea/coffee times after midday.

Eet smakelijk :)

Old Dutch Apple Pie

Monday is Dennis' birthday. He asked me to bake a pie. "The one I always do, with the apples" he said.

Oh, and if I could make of for his colleagues at work on Sunday as well.

And...please, can I make one extra so we have some for the day after his birthday...

So suddenly I was kneading this massive dough!

The recipe is simple and so Dutch. It's my

grandmothers old recipe from her old cooking-book, but then adapted to what she prefers (my mum guessed the recipe is actually older then the cooking-book in which she wrote the adaptations, which means it's over 70 years old, maybe even older she said).

The good thing is that you can make this pie in basically every oven. Hot air or whatever. I even once made it in a pot on a cole fire and once I'd

put it in the microwave. And it always turns out well.

Now I don't even use scales anymore to weigh all ingredients. I just guess and 'feel' that it's all right.

And because I make this pie so often I decided to share this old recipe with you. This is the translated version, as even for some Dutchies the old Dutch language is difficult to read :)

Recipe, for one pie in a 16cm tin.

Dough:

• 300g flour
• 120g brown sugar
• 210g butter (no margarine)
• 1 large egg
• grated lemon peel of one lemon
• some salt

Filling:

• 3 or 4 sour apples (like the green 'granny smith')
• 2 spoons of normal sugar
• 3 table-spoons of apricot jam
• some cinnamon
• if you want: dried white raisins

Add the flour together with a sniff of salt and the lemonpeel in a bowl.

Add the butter. Cut the butter into little blocks and stir it through the flour mixture.

Add the browsugar and most of the beaten egg.

Knead the dough into a cohesive ball.

If the dough is too weak, put it into the fridge for a while.

Rub the tin (or silicone form) with a bit of butter. Take off 1/4 of the dough (for the topping) and push and knead the dough in the tin so it fills the bottom and the side. The dough has to be less then 1cm thick. I often make it even thinner then 0,5cm.

If your worried of the dough sticking onto the sides after baking it, then don't rub the dough in the tin itself but roll it out separately and lay it in the tin on a layer of rubbed in butter with some flour over it.

Now cut the apples in small parts or blocks (whatever you prefer) and put them in the a bowl. Always cut off the peel of the apples. The peel makes the pie taste a bit bitter. And the texture is not too nice for the rather 'soft' (or more 'al dente) pie.

Add the apricot jam, a spoon of sugar, a sniff of cinnamon and the dry raisins. If you want you can add some lemon juice to avoid the apples turning brown. Stir the mixture and put it all into the bed of dough.

Now make little 'dough stripes' for the topping and garnish the apples with the stripes. Make a funny text or put them in classic diamonds over the mixture.

'Paint' the diamond pattern with the rest of the whipped egg and the rest of the sugar.

Now comes the difficult part: baking the pie.

Depending on your microwave, oven, or barbecue you should just keep an eye on the baking process. In the oven I have at home it takes 50 minutes on 200 degrees (Celcius) but my parents oven has a double function (microwave/hot air) and then it takes only 20 minutes. On a fire I always have to watch so the bottom doesn't burn and when you only use the microwave you have to watch that the dough doesn't get too hard.

Just see it as a bit experiment. Once you get the skills you can make this pie everywhere, even when you're our camping!

Happy birthday and enjoy!