Hope you all had a fantastic Queen’s Day!!

Well it took three days, several attempts and it nearly didn’t happen but I finally made Tompoezen!! This is all largely due to the support and some translations from my lovely Dutch flat-mate! :D (Thanks!)

Tompoezen are two layers of puff pastry, filled with pastry cream, topped with a layer of simple icing (usually pink, but orange for Queen’s Day) and served with fresh cream.

I expected the puff pastry to be the most difficult part, but it turned out to be very easy although time consuming. The part I struggled with the most was the pastry cream. It took me a few tries to get it right and I very nearly threw in the towel and put this up:

With a bit of motivation and a good translation of this Dutch recipe on youtube; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lk9EVEsWvc which is worth watching to get an idea of how these are made, and is also quite entertaining even if you don’t speak Dutch: I finally produced a worthwhile batch of Tompoezen and learned how to make two bakery staples on the way.

I found a very good puff pastry recipe on this website which gave a really fantastic, delicious result! http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/restaurant/techniques/pastry.html Ignore any recipe that goes beyond butter, water, flour and salt as its ingredients. Making your own puff pastry is very time consuming, and the only real trick is to make it in a relatively cool room. You don’t need to make it in a walk-in freezer but don’t make it with the heating on and if you just so happen to have a slab of marble handy, refrigerate it and roll the pastry out on that. All that said, frozen puff pastry works perfectly well and is usually of pretty good quality, I just feel like I wouldn’t be learning all that much about cooking if I bought ready made ingredients.

The pastry cream proved to be the most difficult part for me to get right and took me three attempts to get it in the end but I eventually figured it out.

Anyway, here’s how I made the Tompoezen:

• 400gm Puff Pastry (homemade, chilled or frozen)
• 1 Litre of milk
• 200 gm White Sugar
• Vanilla extract
• 100gm Cornstarch
• 3 egg yolks
• 200 gm Icing Sugar
• Pink or Orange food colouring.

- Bring 950 ml of milk, 1 tsp of vanilla extract and 100 gm of white sugar to the boil and then turn it off.
- Whisk together 3 egg yolks, 100g cornstarch, 100g white sugar and 50ml of milk.
- Whisk the egg mixture in to the milk mixture and turn the heat back on.
- Keep stirring the mixture on a medium heat and allow to thicken.
- Turn off the heat and let it cool.
- Preheat oven to 200C.
- Roll out the pastry so it is about 3mm thick and cut it to fit a baking tray.
- Lay the pastry out on the baking tray.
- Pierce the pastry all over with a fork (this prevents the pastry from rising too much).
- Bake pastry until golden brown (about 10 minutes).
- Remove from oven and allow to cool slightly before cutting in to 4x7cm rectangles.
- Prepare icing by mixing 200gm of icing sugar with 2 tablespoons of water and some pink or orange food colouring.
- Spread a thin layer of icing on half of the puff pastry rectangles.
- Pipe a thick layer of pastry cream on to the other puff pastry rectangles.
- Place the iced layer on top of the cream layer.
- Serve with whipped cream!

7 down, 20 to go......