A “tompouce” – or napoleon as it’s known elsewhere – is two layers of crispy puff pastry with a thick filling of bakers’ cream. The top is usually iced in pink, but on happy occasions of *great national importance*, like when the national football team is playing, or on April 30 – Queens Day, the icing is orange.

How the tompouce got its name

There are variants of this type of pastry found all over Europe, Russia and the US, and “napoleon” is often part of it’s name. It is quite probable that it originated in Naples – “napolitan pastry” became napoleon – and that it was already known as such in the early 19th century or earlier. But when in 1845 the famous P.T. Barnum circus came to Holland, a midget playing the role of Napoleon became a huge sensation here. His showname was General Tom Thumb. According to Wikipedia, this inspired a Friesian midget a few years later to adapt the name of Admiral Tom Pouce – the French translation for Tom Thumb, in an age when English was not yet the universal language.

So it seems that the cream-filled pastry from Naples borrowed Bonaparte’s name when that was still punny, then got connected to a sensational Tom Thumb from the circus, whose name was wittily localized by using the French Tom Pouce, which in later years simply became “tompoes” in Dutch. And then, when it had lost all connection to Napoleon, the tompoes pastry in its turn inspired Marten Toonder’s cat cartoon character Tom Poes. Some telephone game!

That we are all having *napoleons* on Queens Day is a kind of historic irony that is flabbergasting: it was the Napoleon-loving Patriots who threw out the ruling Orange family and turned Holland into the revolutionary, orange-less Batavian Republic, back in 1795… hoot!

Method: how to keep the puff pastry flat

You will need twe baking trays that will fit inside each other or on top of each other. Cut two strips of baking paper that are larger than the tray. Line one tin with baking paper. Lay out the puff pastry on the baking tray, edges connecting. With a fork, prick a pattern of little holes in the pastry. Brush with water. Put this in a pre-heated oven of 200° C for 5 minutes: the pastry will puff up. Now gently put the second piece of baking paper on top of the pastry, and sit the second baking tray on top of that. Bake for another 10 minutes. This will keep the pastry from ballooning up. When done, give it another 4 or 5 minutes without the second tray and paper, to give the pastry a nice brown color.

Prepare the bakers’ cream

Take the puff pastry out of the oven to cool, and start on the filling. Either prepare the cream by the instructions on the package, which takes 5 minutes, or make it from scratch. For that, beat the egg yolks, flour and sugars for 3 minutes. Heat up the milk and add one or two spoonfuls to the egg mixture to prevent lumps. Now add the egg mixture to the milk and whisk till it thickens. Leave to cool, but stir carefully once in a while to prevent a skin. It will need to have the consistancy of pudding or thick custard when cooled off.

Assembly time

Cut the used baking paper in half lengthwise; line a smaller tray or container with it. Put the four bottom pastry slabs on it – this way you can laterget the pastry out of the container more easily. Using either a broad knife or a piping bag, add the thickened cream on top and shape it. Put the other four pastry slabs on top. Leave this in the fridge to firm up for about an hour.

The icing

As home-made icing in my experience gets rather runny when saved, add the icing on the day you will serve this. I made the orange color by mixing a bit of red and yellow “writing icing” and added the white icing to that. The *real* thing comes in a shade of orange that fully matches the bright orange garb of the Dutch football players and threatens to take off the glaze on your teeth, which is part of its charm of course, but I wasn’t able to find the right coloring at short notice.
Finish off with some piped-on whipped cream. Also good at any other day, special or not.