Hi everyone in The Weekend community. I am Niiva and this is my first post in this community, hope that you guys enjoy it. Today I am going to introduce to you one of the famous festivals in Viet Nam, it's called Mid-year festival, or Doan Ngo Festival, also known as the insect killing festival. It is held on the 5/5 (Lunar) every year. A traditional cake indispensable on this holiday is small pyramidal glutinous rice cake which has the shape of triangular pyramid with sticky rice inside. In my hometown, every year from May 1 to May 4 (lunar), people start making cakes to prepare for selling to merchants and offerings on May 5 (lunar). It's not common in many places, this baking is a tradition in a small village where I live, people will make thousands of cakes every day, then they will cook it in a big pot. It takes about 3-4 hours to cook. Once cooked, it will be drained and sold to merchants in bulk. And now I will show you how to make this special cake.
To wrap the cake, the indispensable things are soaked glutinous rice, dong leaves (the name of a local leaf), and cake wrapping cord. Firstly, sticky rice is soaked for about 16 hours with ash water, then people filter the water to dry the sticky rice. Next is the leaves to wrap the cake, the leaves are bought from the pickers in the mountains, it is wrapped in small bundles, each bundle can pack about 30-40 cakes. And finally, a rope is needed to tie the cake firmly, the rope is also soaked in water to prevent it from breaking when tied.
The cord is wound up in a large bundle and fixed in one place. Then, you use 2 leaves to roll up into a funnel shape as shown below, you pour about 1 tablespoon of sticky rice into that funnel and slowly wrap it up to form a triangular pyramid, finally you use a cord to tie the cake. And the result is that you have a cake with a unique shape as shown below. On average, an hour I will wrap about 100-120 cakes.
People often gather at my house to wrap cakes together and chat so they don't get bored. Each person has a separate corner to make cakes, usually I will choose a place to lean back because sitting for many hours will cause back pain. Usually, every time I make a bunch of 300-400 cakes in about 3 hours, after we're done we take them apart and start making another batch.
Usually my mother, my brother, my aunt and me are in charge of wrapping the cake, while my dad will arrange the cakes into 10 pieces and tie them together. After tying together 10 of them, my father continued to wrap them into a bunch the size of 50 cakes, you can see some pictures below. We start work at 7am and usually end at 9pm, we will take a lunch break of about 1 hour to eat, then continue working. After summarizing, we make about 5000 to 6000 cakes per day.
This is the result of our day, lots of cakes tied up in bunches and neatly arranged in a corner of the house. These cakes will be cooked for about 3-4 hours before being sold to traders. They are one of the indispensable cakes in this mid-year festival in Vietnam. In particular, it is often offered in large numbers at seaports, a custom that has existed since long before that. I heard that, after making offerings, it is often sprinkled into the sea as a wish of peace for residents preparing to set sail in the following days. As for the people here, people often eat it after worshiping, it is often eaten with sugar, a very delicious dish for me.
Thanks for reading my article and see you guys in my next posts. Have a nice weekend! Love all!