Recipe: Tompouce cake

Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the gourmands at online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our cheffies serve you: tompouce cake.

Heel Holland Bakt-winner Rutger keeps happily baking. Countless cakes, cookies, pastries, breads, and desserts have come out of his oven. The 100 most popular recipes from Rutger are now compiled in his new baking book Rutger bakes the 100 best recipes. Our favorite? Hard to choose, but the tompouce cake is definitely in the top 3!

Rutger: ‘Whenever I eat a tompouce, I always think of my grandma. During school holidays, I often went to the market with her on Wednesdays. Afterwards, we always had a tompouce at the well-known department store. With this recipe, you bake a tompouce cake that is much tastier than that tompouce from back in the day, but every time I think back to those Wednesdays with my grandma with a smile.’

Here's how to make the tompouce cake

• Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.
• Roll out the puff pastry and place it with baking paper on the baking sheet. Cut the dough in half widthwise. Prick the puff pastry every few centimeters with a fork so that it doesn't puff up while baking. Bake the puff pastry for 8 minutes. Lower the oven temperature to 180 degrees and place a metal (cake or oven) rack on the puff pastry sheet. Press the dough down with it and leave the rack on top so that the sheet stays flat. Bake the dough with the rack on top for another 13-18 minutes until it is nicely golden brown. Remove the rack and let the puff pastry cool on another rack.
• Whip the pastry cream with a (hand) mixer with whisk(s) and distribute it using a piping bag with a serrated nozzle of 1½ centimeters over 1 sheet of baked puff pastry. Whip the cream with the sugar and the cream stabilizer with a (hand) mixer with whisk(s) until stiff and also put this in a piping bag with a serrated nozzle of 1½ centimeters. Distribute the whipped cream over the pastry cream, but keep a little cream aside for the decoration on the cake. Cover the whipped cream with the other puff pastry sheet.
• Puree the raspberries with a fork. Press the raspberries through a fine sieve so that the seeds remain behind. Weigh 35 grams of the raspberry puree and put it in a saucepan. Add the powdered sugar and mix it into a glaze. Heat the glaze while stirring until lukewarm. Brush the top of the puff pastry with the glaze and let it set. Decorate the tompouce cake with the remaining whipped cream and fresh raspberries.

Here's how to make the pastry cream

• Pour 450 milliliters of milk into a saucepan. Cut the vanilla pod lengthwise with a sharp knife and scrape out the seeds. Add both the scraped pod and the seeds to the milk and bring everything to a boil.
• Put the remaining milk with the sugar and the egg yolks in a bowl and mix it well. Finally, stir in the cornstarch and make a nice smooth paste.
• Remove the vanilla pod when the milk is boiling. Gradually pour half of the hot milk into the sugar mixture while stirring. Stir it well. Then pour this mixture back into the milk in the saucepan and bring everything to a boil while stirring continuously. The mixture will start to thicken. Keep stirring all the time. Let the mixture simmer gently for 1-2 minutes.
• Pour the pastry cream into a low flat dish (this cools it faster) and cover it with plastic wrap. Make sure the wrap is directly on the cream to prevent a skin from forming. Let the cream cool a bit on the counter and then place the bowl in the refrigerator until use.
• Whip the pastry cream before use with a (hand) mixer with whisk(s).

Title: Rutger Bakes the 100 best recipes
Author: Rutger van den Broek
Price: €29,99
Publisher: Carrera Culinair