Dutch King's Day Tompuce

In the Netherlands, April 27 is a national holiday celebrating the king's birthday - King's Day. To mark the occasion many people hold or visit flea markets (it's the one day of the year street sales are allowed without applying for a permit); there are parties and events, people wear orange - the national colour - and eat tompouce.

These are a pastry similar to a mille-feuille, but with one layer instead of two, consisting of a piece of crispy puff pastry, a layer of creme patissiere (pastry cream, often referred to as creme pat) and another piece of pastry, with royal icing spread on top. Normally the icing is pink but on King's Day, when these are popular, the icing is orange.

This King's Day I was invited to a party by a Dutch colleague and wanted to take something with me, and learned about tompouce via the internet (apparently they are named after a 19th century actor). I found out from my friend that he had been unable to find any tompouce in the UK, but that they are a lot like mille-feuille, which you can find in most bakeries - though probably without the orange layer on top. As he had only just moved to the UK a few months before I thought I would try to recreate a little taste of home!

I found a recipe for tompouce online - there are several but I used this one from My Red Kitchen and pretty much followed it step by step, but made the icing orange. It felt like I was doing a technical challenge from the Great British Bake Off - making something I'd never heard of before, that involved several steps (though I used ready-made puff pastry which would have been an automatic fail on GBBO!), and instructions like "cut each sheet [of pastry] into 16 equal squares". 

I may have made mine too big but having never seen a tompouce I'm not sure what size they are supposed to be, and they seemed on a par with mille-feuilles. I didn't know exactly how much gelatine to used just said 'one envelope gelatine' and referred to jell-o at the store which makes me think this is perhaps a standard size in the US. I had a packet with four leaves of gelatine remaining which it said was the right amount for one pint of liquid but the creme pat had already thickened quite a bit so I probably didn't need that much. Rather than using a piping bag I was able to actually slice it (as I'd let it set in a large shallow rectangular dish), which I thought was quite handy at the time but in retrospect it doesn't look great and I should have piped it. Still, they tasted pretty good!

Mary's Chocolate Orange Tart - GBBO Bakealong

Chocolate week on Great British Bake Off would once have seen me coming up with some elaborate creation, no doubt a lavishly decorated cake. But I don’t have the luxury of a lot of time any more and wasn’t really in the mood for cake - I fancied making a dessert that would keep for a couple of days. It seemed appropriate to use a GBBO recipe book and having a flick through, I settled on Mary Berry's chocolate orange tart from the Great British Bake Off Big Book of Baking.

The chocolate filling is a mixture of chocolate, sugar, butter, flour and eggs - so it's no wonder that it seemed quite cake-y to me. But the trick is not to overbake it and leave it slightly wobbly in the centre - I always have my mum's voice in the back of my mind at times like that, warning me that it isn’t cooked (or half raw, as she would probably put it) which explains why my brownies are usually overbaked! 

There is also an orange filling that you make in a similar way but using egg yolks not whole eggs, white chocolate, and the grated zest of one orange. But for some reason oranges were completely out of stock on my online shop that week (perhaps as we go into lockdown in winter, people are worried they will get scurvy?!) so I made do with a few drops of orange essence instead.

The idea is to swirl the two fillings together inside your pastry case to create a marbled effect. I think this looks quite pretty, don't you?

It is delicious served warm and also very good served cold a day or two later - if it lasts that long!

Easy Vegan Pumpkin Pie to use your leftover pumpkin

I was determined to use up my pumpkins in cooking this year and not just throw them away so as well as this pumpkin and gnocchi gratin I made a pumpkin pie. I've made a pumpkin cheesecake (vegan) before, and this chocolate pumpkin cheesecake, but I've never made an actual pumpkin pie before.

I was spending the weekend with friends so a pie seemed like a nice thing to take; one friend is vegan so I needed to find a vegan recipe. I had a look online and ended up creating my own recipe based on this one from Yummy Mummy Kitchen, but using shop-bought shortcrust pastry, which is vegan, and using my fresh pumpkin rather than canned, coconut milk and cornflour to thicken, and brown sugar and golden syrup to sweeten it. The end result was a soft baked pie filling, almost the consistency of a baked cheesecake, which tasted delicious! It was very popular with my friends, vegan and non-vegan alike.

See below for the full recipe - I also want to mention here the vacuum seal food storage container from Ozeri that I used to transport and store my pie in. You get two large domed containers in the pack, and you simply close the valve at the top and push down to create a vaccum seal; when you want to open the container just open the valve. This keeps the food fresh and there's also a handy dial you turn to show which day you put the food in the container. They are fairly large to store but are a nice sturdy design and I like the fact that the lid is clear plastic so you can see what's inside, so this is also a nice way to serve food for instance when you are outside in the summer and want to keep the insects away!

 

It's currently available on the UK Amazon site but with fairly high shipping costs as it comes from the US, or you can find it on other Amazon sites which are cheaper to ship to the UK.

So here's how I made my pumpkin pie
Serves 10-12

Flesh from one large pumpkin, skin removed, chopped
500g shortcrust pastry block
The cream from the top of a 400ml tin of coconut milk plus some of the milk making up 200ml in total
150ml golden syrup
75g brown sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground nutmeg
3 tbsp. cornflour

Stew the chopped pumpkin in a pan of boiling water until softened then drain. Allow to cool then pulse in a food processor until you have a smooth puree.

Preheat oven to 180C. Roll out the pastry and use to line either a deep tart tin or a loose bottomed cake tin. Line with greaseproof paper and fill with baking beans and blind bake in a preheated oven for 15-20 minutes until the pastry is starting to turn golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to cook while you make the filling.

In a large bowl, mix the pumpkin puree, coconut cream and milk, golden syrup, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and cornflour and beat until smooth.

Pour into the pie crust and return to the oven for 45 minutes. If the top of the pie starts to brown too much, cover with foil.

 

Remove from the oven and leave to cool then chill overnight in the fridge - this should make the filling set.

I'm sharing this with Baking Crumbs hosted by Jo's Kitchen Larder and CookBlogShare hosted by EasyPeasyFoodie.
 

Thanks to Ozeri for the food storage containers to review.

Puff Pastry Cheese, Bacon and Spring Onion Tart

This is an easy meal idea that is great for an informal dinner with friends, as it can be assembled before your guests arrive and then can go in the oven 20 minutes before you want to eat. You can play around with the toppings as well to use whatever you fancy - it's a good way of using up odds and ends in the fridge as well.

Simply take a piece of ready-made puff pastry - around 200g per person should be plenty, and I made each person their own - and roll out on a lightly floured surface into either a circle or square shape (or something in between!). Place onto a lightly oiled baking sheet.

Chop a few rashers of bacon and fry along with some chopped spring onions. When cooked, remove from pan and allow to cool.

Spread the pastry base with garlic and herb-flavoured soft cheese then scatter over the bacon and spring onion. Grate some cheese - Cheddar works well - and sprinkle over the tart. I also added some crumbled blue cheese.

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 180C for 20 minutes or until the pastry has risen and is golden. Serve with a green salad.

I'm sending this to Cook Blog Share, hosted this week by Easy Peasy Foodie.

Vegan French Apple Tart

This month's Food 'n' Flix challenge is French Kiss - the 1995 movie starring Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline. The film was chosen by Food 'n' Flix creator Heather at All Roads Lead to the Kitchen - you can see her announcement post here, and you can take part any time this month.

The premise of the film is that Kate (Meg Ryan) is flying to France alone, to confront her cheating fiancé; she is seated on the plane next to Luc (Kevin Kline), a thief who hides a stolen necklace in her bag. Which of course means that he needs to retrieve the necklace later, so Luc offers to help Kate win back her fiancé.

They bond and Kate learns that Luc gambled away his birthright to the family vineyard but dreams of buying his own vineyard some day. I won't spoil what happens as Kate goes after her fiancé and Luc tries to sell the stolen necklace - you will have to watch the film yourself!

I enjoyed the film even though it was a bit predictable and quite dated, but Meg Ryan is always good in a rom-com.

There are plenty of nice foodie references as well; for instance Kate finds her errant fiance eating in a restaurant with his new girlfriend's parents. She tries to hide and sneaks around the restaurant so she can spy on them, and predictably ends up crashing into a dessert trolley and getting a face full of food

Kate and Luc are having breakfast on the train of French bread and cheese and Luc tells her that there are 452 official cheeses in France; she tries some but is sick as she is lactose intolerant (presumably the cheese is worth it!). This means they have to get off the train part way, in what is Luc's home town and they stay at his family home, and this is where Kate learns about his dream to create a vineyard.

 

When I was thinking about recipes to make, I kept thinking of tarte tatin - a lovely French tart that is cooked upside down in a pan using apples or sometimes pears, that I have made a few times and really love. I wanted to make something a bit different but the vineyard idea had put fruit in my head as well.

I was visiting friends for new year's eve and had been asked if I could bring dessert. I made these chocolate brownies with candy cane frosting but wanted to make something that wasn't chocolate, and that my vegan friend could enjoy. (I would have made vegan brownies but was only using ingredients I already had in the house, and didn't have what I need).

I found a recipe on Good to Know for French apple tart and decided to make it vegan by making my own pastry.

What I love about this tart is that you have fluted apple slices on top which look appealing, but underneath a layer of sweet stewed apple. The combination of textures is amazing and it tasted delicious.

This is what I did:

To serve 6, you need:
for the pastry:
125g plain flour
55g vegan (soya) margarine - I used Pure
2-3 tbsp. water
for the filling:
6 eating apples
20g butter
50g caster sugar plus 2 tbsp. for later


First make the pastry, by sifting the flour into a large bowl and using your fingertips rub in the soya margarine to make a breadcrumb texture. Add a couple of tablespoons of cold water and mix by hand until you have a dough consistency. Form the dough into a ball and wrap in clingfilm; put the dough in the fridge while you make the filling.

Cut one of the apples in half and peel four and a half. Cut the peeled apples into small chunks and put in a saucepan with the butter and 4 tbsp. water. Bring to the boil and simmer until the apples have softened; you may need to top up the water as you go. You don't want the mixture to be wet at the end, though you can drain it through a sieve if necessary.

When the apples have softened add the 50g sugar (return the apples to the pan if you have drained them) and heat, stirring, until the sugar has dissolved. Leave the mixture to cool.

Preheat oven to 190C. Roll out the pastry and line a 9-inch fluted tart tin. Line with greaseproof paper and fill with ceramic baking beans or raw rice and bake the empty pie crust in the oven for 10 minutes.

Carefully remove the paper and the baking beans and bake the pie case for another 5 mins until golden brown.

Spread the apple filling over the pastry base then peel the remaining apples.

Remove the core with a corer or knife and slice the apples very thinly all the way around so you can fan them out over the top of the tart as shown.

Sprinkle over the remaining caster sugar and bake in the oven for 20-30 minutes until the apples have turned golden brown. Serve warm or cold.

I'm sharing this with Food n Flix as described above.

I'm also sharing this with CookBlogShare, hosted this week by Sneaky Veg.

Cowboy Pie

This pie is based on an idea I saw in a Slimming World book or magazine a while ago but isn't actually particularly Slimming - I wanted an excuse to use my cow print rolling pin again! It came from Etsy and was a Christmas gift last year I think but I've only used it a few times. The rolling pin leaves an imprint of a cow pattern on anything you roll out!

I decided to theme a pie around it and use it to roll out the pastry to go on the top. The cow theme would work for cottage pie (which uses minced beef) but I decided to make what I call a cowboy pie - based on sausage and beans which have associations with cowboys sitting around a camp fire!

Preheat the oven to 180C. First fry or grill a couple of sausages per person until they are just cooked and cut into chunks. You can also add some diced chorizo or pancetta to the pan and fry. Put into a pie dish (either an individual dish or a large one - I did an individual one for my husband) and pour over half a tin of baked beans and mix together.

You can see how the rolling pin leaves the cow pattern on the pastry. I used ready-made shortcrust pastry though you can make your own.

Top the pie with the pastry and trim the edges; make a small hole for any steam to escape

When baked the pastry should turn golden brown (though it doesn't look very brown in this picture)

You also can't see the cow pattern very well any more in this photo, but it was there!

This is what the pie looks like inside - my husband said it was good. It's a nice change to the way you might normally serve sausage and beans, anyway!

Hoxton Street Monster Supplies Cookbook Giveaway and Halloween Chocolate Orange Tart

 

 

I've got a great giveaway just in time for Halloween where not one, not two, but three of you can win a spooky cookery book full of recipes and ideas for party food for Halloween and any sort of horror-themed party (movie night?) you might want to hold at any time of the year.

The Hoxton Street Monster Supplies Cookbook is worth £13 and is a beautifully illustrated 160 page hardback cookbook with over 70 recipes and humorous advice for entertaining.

Hoxton Street Monster Supplies claims to be London’s "and quite possibly the world’s only purveyor of quality goods for monsters of every kind." All profits go to the Ministry of Stories, a creative writing and mentoring charity for young people which looks absolutely brilliant; I would have loved something like this when I was a kid and am going to look into signing up as a volunteer.

The cookery book says it is a revised edition featuring recipes suitable for humans, but has plenty of advice for what to do if you are inviting the undead to your party - allow extra time for zombies to eat dinner as they tend to be very slow; never seat a cyclops next to a giant spider (cyclops are sensitive about the fact that they only have one eye) and so on.

Recipes are divided into chapters: sweets and pastilles (including crunching bone toffee and fairy brain fudge), biscuits and cookies  (phlegmy dodgers, gingerdead men and toenail macaroons), cakes and bakes (clotted blood cakes, fresh maggot brownies, which I couldn't bring myself to make, and spiced earwax pie, which looked like treacle tart from the recipe), jams and curds (including human snot curd and pickled eyeballs), savoury snacks (chunky vomit dip, small intestine skewers) and potions and poisons (eg satanic smoothie).

The recipe for brain cake, or rather 'braaaiiiinnnn cake', made me laugh - translated for use by zombies. The recipe runs: "Oooooooog. BBBRRRAAAIIINNNNS! Brraaaauuuunnnnns. AAR! Errrrrg" and so on. So I won't be attempting that one.

If you can get past the slight sense of revulsion that I felt when reading the names of some of the recipes (yes I know they are not serious but some are just gross!) and read the introduction to each recipe they are really funny - and I can assure you that the recipes contain perfectly normal ingredients! I think this would go down really well with children in particular so if you fancy being in with a chance to win a copy of the book scroll down to the end.

 

The giveaway is open to UK addresses only and the books will be sent to the winners directly by the publishers.

I decided to make one recipe from the book so I could review it, and since it was over a week until Halloween and I wasn't about to throw a party I decided to make one of the most normal sounding recipes: Night Terror Torte. This is basically a chocolate and orange tart, using a ready-made sweet shortcrust pastry base.

You slice two oranges and cook them in a sugar syrup (mixture of sugar and water); bake the pastry case blind and then make the filling from ground almonds, butter, sugar and eggs then dark chocolate. Add some of the orange slices which you have chopped while keeping the rest for decoration, and bake the assembled tart in the oven.

 

raw:

 

 

cooked

 

 

scroll down for the giveaway- starting at midnight tonight!

 

 

 

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Slimming World Lemon Meringue Pie

Lemon meringue pie is delicious but normally quite high in sugar. Anyone wanting a low-sugar version of a lemon meringue pie should take a look at this Slimming World recipe. It uses ready-made shortcrust pastry, so it isn’t entirely diet-friendly, but uses sweetener in place of sugar and doesn’t use any butter in the filling – it uses gelatine instead, which is much lower in calorie.

 

I already had some pastry in the freezer I needed to use up and my husband likes lemon meringue pie (he usually doesn’t like any of the desserts I want to make!) so when I came across this recipe in an old copy of Slimming World magazine it seemed like a great idea. Unfortunately I never get on with using my grill – it’s above eye-level and really hard to keep an eye on it – and I burned the top a bit!

 

Other than that it was fairly easy to make, especially if you are using ready-made pastry, though you do have to allow the filling to set overnight in the fridge. I couldn’t find my baking beans so the bottom did rise up a bit when I blind baked the pastry case but I didn’t mind.

 

 

To make the filling, you boil water with the sweetener until it turns syrupy, then remove from the heat and whisk in the lemon zest and juice and egg yolks. You then cook it in the microwave to set.

 

Stir in the gelatine, allow to dissolve and if you like you can sieve it to remove the zest though I left that in. Allow to cool and pour into the pastry case and leave in the fridge overnight to set.

 

To make the meringue topping, whisk egg whites and sweetener and spoon over the base. Place under a hot grill just for a minute or two until lightly browned on top – be careful not to burn it! I forgot to take any photos after I took it out of the tin, but wanted to share this recipe anyway - this tasted really good, not really any different to a full-sugar lemon meringue pie in my opinion.

 

Mini Chicken and Ham Picnic Pasties

Copyright Caroline Makes dot Net

These mini pasties are a good way to use up leftover cooked chicken, are easy to make (especially if you use shop-bought pastry) and are a nice alternative to sandwiches to take on a picnic or in your lunchbox.

I had some shortcrust pastry in the freezer, and these pie moulds from Lakeland I bought ages ago in the sale and had never gotten around to using.

You get three different size moulds in the box:

I cooked some chicken (you could also use ready cooked) and mixed it with some chopped ham from a tin, a handful of fresh parsley and a little crème fraiche (I would have added onion but my husband doesn't really like it). You can also add peas, mushroom or sweetcorn (cooked) if you like.

Rolling out the pastry, I decided to open out the pie mould and cut around it to get circles of the right size.

I placed the circle inside the mould, put filling in one half and squeezed it shut - this makes it so easy to get the lovely fluted edge you see on Cornish pasties.

I glazed them with milk and baked them in the oven at 180C for about 20-25 mins.

 

Let me know if you try different variants on the filling!

I'm sharing these with Cook Once, Eat Twice, hosted by Corina at Searching for Spice.