Chef Joost
Appelkruimeltaart
The name gives away the whole pleasure: apples below, kruimel, crumbs, above, and no lattice pretending to be architecture when buttered rubble will do better.
Culinary Explorer
A cooking platform built around craft, culture, and the stories behind what we eat.
Roomsoes (Dutch Cream Puffs)
Created by
The Dutch cream puff is a birthday lesson in restraint: plain choux baked hollow, split wide, and filled with whipped cream so the table gets sweetness, air, and powdered sugar on every sleeve.
Pastries & Cookies
Dutch
Birthday
Celebration
Special Occasion
35 min
Active Time
45 min cook•1 hr 55 min total
Yield12 roomsoezen
At a Dutch birthday, the first geography a child learns is the circle. Chairs along the wall, coffee moving hand to hand, aunties inspecting the bakery box with the seriousness other nations reserve for elections. A roomsoes has no proper month; its season is the birthday. In my grandmother's second notebook, roomsoezen were marked for feast days when there wasn't time for a cake but there was, for obvious reasons, time for cream.
The name already tells you, without making a fuss. Room is cream; soes is the Dutch child of French choux, cabbages, because a baked puff wrinkles and rounds itself like a small cabbage. The journey is not exotic, only telling: French patisserie walked into Dutch bakkerijen, bakeries, sat down beside filter coffee, and lost every ounce of grandeur. That is how a foreign technique becomes a Dutch birthday.
But let me tell you a secret: the hard part of a roomsoes is leaving it alone. Soezendeeg, choux dough, rises because the wet paste turns its own water into lift; open the door too early and you flatten the little room you meant to fill. Cook the flour properly in the pan, add the eggs only until the dough hangs in a soft V, bake until dry and firm, then split and fill. Hou het altijd simpel. A roomsoes asks for no fruit, no chocolate, no architectural ambition. Cream, sugar, shell, table.
The Dutch soes is borrowed from French choux, plural of chou, cabbage, the name attached to pâte à choux because the baked puffs resemble small cabbages. By the time Antonin Carême published Le Pâtissier royal parisien in 1815, choux pastry was central to French patisserie; nineteenth-century Dutch bakkerijen, bakeries, made the technique domestic in roomsoezen filled with slagroom and dusted with poedersuiker. The useful thing to tell at the table is that this is not province-bound peasant fare but a European pastry technique that became Dutch once it entered the birthday coffee circle.
The technique, the tradition, and the story behind every dish.
Discover Culinary ExplorerIngredients
whole milk
Quantity
125ml
water
Quantity
125ml
unsalted butter
Quantity
100g
cubed
granulated sugar
Quantity
1 teaspoon
fine salt
Quantity
1/4 teaspoon
plain flour (all-purpose flour)
Quantity
150g
sifted
large eggs
Quantity
4
at room temperature and beaten
cold heavy whipping cream or Dutch slagroom
Quantity
500ml
poedersuiker (powdered sugar)
Quantity
40g
plus more for dusting
vanilla extract or vanillesuiker (vanilla sugar)
Quantity
1 teaspoon or 8g
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| whole milk | 125ml |
| water | 125ml |
| unsalted buttercubed | 100g |
| granulated sugar | 1 teaspoon |
| fine salt | 1/4 teaspoon |
| plain flour (all-purpose flour)sifted | 150g |
| large eggsat room temperature and beaten | 4 |
| cold heavy whipping cream or Dutch slagroom | 500ml |
| poedersuiker (powdered sugar)plus more for dusting | 40g |
| vanilla extract or vanillesuiker (vanilla sugar) | 1 teaspoon or 8g |
Equipment Needed
- •Heavy-bottomed saucepan
- •Wooden spoon or sturdy silicone spatula
- •Piping bag with large round or star nozzle
- •Baking tray and parchment
- •Electric hand mixer or balloon whisk
Instructions
- 1
Heat the oven
Heat the oven to 200C, or 180C fan. Line a baking tray with parchment. If your piping hand is nervous, draw twelve 5cm circles on the paper and turn it over; the pencil stays away from the pastry and the home cook keeps dignity intact.
- 2
Cook the paste
Put the milk, water, butter, sugar, and salt in a heavy saucepan and bring it to a full boil. Pull the pan off the heat, add the flour all at once, and beat hard with a wooden spoon until no dry flour remains. Return the pan to medium heat and keep stirring for 2 to 3 minutes, until the dough gathers into a ball and a thin film forms on the bottom. That film is not a mistake; it is the dough drying just enough to become hollow later.
- 3
Add the eggs
Tip the hot dough into a mixing bowl and let it cool for 5 minutes, so the eggs don't scramble. Beat in the eggs a little at a time, waiting until each addition disappears before adding more. Stop when the dough is glossy and falls from the spoon in a soft V; you may not need the final spoonful of egg. Soezendeeg, choux dough, is not batter. It should hold ridges and still look willing to move.
Eggs vary. Trust the soft V more than the number in the shell; a stiff dough won't rise cleanly, and a loose one spreads before it can build its hollow. - 4
Pipe the shells
Spoon the dough into a piping bag fitted with a large round or star nozzle. Pipe 12 mounds, each about 5 to 6cm wide, leaving space between them. Smooth any sharp points with a wet fingertip, because those little peaks brown first and then complain about it.
- 5
Bake them hollow
Bake for 20 minutes without opening the door. Lower the heat to 180C, or 160C fan, and bake 10 to 15 minutes more, until puffed, deeply golden, and firm when lifted. Now open the oven, pierce each shell near its base with a skewer or small knife, and set them back in the switched-off oven with the door ajar for 10 minutes. The little cut lets moisture leave; a closed shell sulks into softness.
If roomsoezen collapse, they were usually underbaked or inspected too early. Curiosity is useful in archives. In the oven, it is expensive. - 6
Cool the shells
Move the shells to a rack and let them cool completely before filling. Split them with a serrated knife, keeping lids paired with bottoms if that sort of order pleases you. If the inside has a damp web of dough, pull out only the wet bit; the hollow is the point.
- 7
Whip the cream
Whip the cold cream with 40g poedersuiker and the vanilla until it stands in soft, generous peaks. Stop before it turns grainy. Butter is a fine Dutch ingredient, but not today.
- 8
Fill and dust
Pipe or spoon the cream into the cooled bottoms, set the lids on top, and dust with more poedersuiker. Serve within a few hours, ideally with coffee in the verjaardagskring, birthday circle. The pastry should crack gently under the teeth, then give way to cream. That is all it promised, and it keeps the promise.
Chef Tips
- •Roomsoezen are a lesson in egg judgment. Add the eggs slowly and stop at the soft V; a dough that pours will spread into pancakes, and pancakes cannot hold cream.
- •Do not open the oven during the first 20 minutes. The shell is building its walls then, and a blast of cool air knocks the architecture flat.
- •Fill close to serving. The cream will soften the shell, which is pleasant after an hour and sad after a night.
- •Use cream with at least 35 percent fat if you can. Dutch slagroom has the body for this; thin cream whips politely and then gives up.
- •If you cover the puff in chocolate, you've wandered toward the Bossche bol from Den Bosch. A roomsoes wears poedersuiker and keeps its manners.
Advance Preparation
- •Bake the shells up to 1 day ahead. Store them unfilled in an airtight tin, then re-crisp at 160C for 5 to 7 minutes and cool fully before filling.
- •Unfilled shells freeze well for up to 1 month. Thaw uncovered, warm briefly in the oven to restore the edges, and cool before adding cream.
- •Filled roomsoezen keep for about 4 hours in the refrigerator, but they are best the day they are made. The shell and cream are friends, not long-term roommates.
Frequently Asked Questions
Nutrition Information
1 serving (about 85g)
Calories
300 calories
Total Fat
24 g
Saturated Fat
15 g
Trans Fat
1 g
Unsaturated Fat
8 g
Cholesterol
130 mg
Sodium
90 mg
Total Carbohydrates
17 g
Dietary Fiber
0 g
Sugars
7 g
Protein
5 g
Where cooking meets culture.
Culinary guides, cultural storytelling, and the editorial depth that makes cooking meaningful.
Discover Culinary ExplorerMore from Dutch Pies, Pastries & Choux
Browse the full collection
Chef Joost
Appelpunt
The name means exactly what it promises: a point of apple, crisp below, spiced within, and finished with cream for the Dutch hour when coffee becomes an occasion.
Chef Joost
Bossche Bol
The Bossche bol is Den Bosch in pastry form: a fist-sized choux shell, a belly full of cream, and enough dark chocolate to make etiquette surrender politely.
Chef Joost
Dutch Banketbakkerij Eclairs
A French lightning bolt found a Dutch coffee table: crisp choux, cool banketbakkersroom, and dark chocolate fondant, the small pastry that makes koffietijd feel like a family occasion.