🍱 Tobitsuki Dango

"Tobitsuki Dango" is a traditional sweets used to be cooked at home commonly as an offering for ancestors during "obon". It looks like "ohagi" (=rice ball coated with sweet red beans) at a glance, but it is a mochi made from glutinous rice with 10% of regular rice, and coated with "sasage" (=cowpea) simmered with keeping its shape. It is popular with simple and slightly sweet taste. "Sasage" is soaked into sugar water after simmered in water so that its outside skin won't be broken. It tastes sweet these days, and it could be salty before. As it looks like pale-red "sasage" is jumping into (‘jumping into' means "tobitsuku" in Japanese) the mochi, they call this mochi "tobitsuki dango". It is also said that people ‘jump into' the sweets to eat because it is very delicious. Originally, "sasage" used to be cultivated at home, and this sweet was prepared during "obon", and as a small present when married ladies went back her parent's home.