12: Tompoes (or tompouce)
I loooove tompoezen (one tompoes + one tompoes = two tompoezen). It is my one weakness one of my weaknesses. And especially the tompoezen that are made and sold by the HEMA. Love them! (Although the whipped cream version made by a bakery in a nearby village isn’t bad either.) So, just for you, dear blogfriends, I went to the HEMA yesterday and got you four tompoezen.
Only for the photos of course.
A tompoes is made of two layers of puff pastry with a vanilla pastry cream filling and pink icing on top. Its shape is always rectangular. Around Queens Day (the day our country celebrates the Queen’s birthday) and when our national football team has to play an important match, the icing on the tompoezen isn’t pink but orange. (Orange is our national colour. Our Royal family is called Van Oranje-Nassau.)
The difficulty with tompoezen is ‘how to eat them in a civilized manner’. You could try to prick your pasty fork into the top layer of puff pastry. It won’t work. You’ll either press the top layer down, making a mess of the whole thing because the cream filling will ooze out, or the whole tompoes will shoot off your plate and land on the floor or against the wall or in the lap of someone else. So pricking your fork in the top layer of pastry is not the best way to attack a tompoes.
The safest and easiest, but perhaps not the most elegant and civil way is to use your hands to take off the top layer, eat that first and then use your pastry fork to eat the rest. Or take alternate bites.
I wonder, how does the Queen eat a tompoes?
Somehow the tompoezen I bought for photographic purposes only ended up on saucers. With pastry forks.
Irresistible.
And the other two we ate that evening. Oops. Weak flesh and all that. (Even weaker with the calories of two tompoezen each added.)
13: HEMA
The HEMA (an acronym for Hollandsche Eenheidsprijzen Maatschappij Amsterdam, ‘Dutch Standard Prices Company Amsterdam’) is a chain of department stores. The first HEMA opened in Amsterdam on November 4th, 1926. Everything on sale had a standard price of 10, 25, 50, 75 or 100 cents. Quality goods for a low price. They still sell good quality products, but the prices are no longer standardized. To see the range of products they sell you can follow the link below (Mara from Weighty Matters tipped me that this site has a fun chain reaction going on):
http://producten.hema.nl/
The HEMA is also famous for its ‘rookworst’ or smoked sausage.
Since the 1990s, HEMA has also expanded into neighbouring countries. Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and France have HEMA’s too.
The HEMA organizes yearly competitions for Design students. The winning design will be produced and sold by the HEMA. This year’s briefing was ‘design an authentic HEMA product, which makes it easier and more fun for people to get out and about’.
You can see the winning design of this year here.
