Dango

It’s another night of FFXIV cooking and Dango 🍡 is on the menu! Ever since Stormblood, whenever I see a dango I think of Yotsuyu. She’s so beautiful and I was immediately drawn to her when I first saw the expansion poster 😍 Shoot I even thought about dressing up as her for the Glamoured to Life at the Fan Fest but I didn’t think I could pull it off. Maybe someday I will with a little modern twist to it. But for now, I will create her favorite treat 😊 The difficulty level is Easy so it should be quick.

This is probably the easiest ingredients to get. There’s not much to it although the freeze-dried strawberries is a little questionable 🤨 But I cannot judge until it is made and tasted.

First things first is to prepare the strawberries and the matcha. I had to crush the strawberries and measure the matcha so it’ll be ready when I need it.

Then it’s time to make the dough. The texture is very different since its rice flour. It felt like a very light sculpting clay 😯

Once it’s ready, I had to divide it into 3 portions.

On the first dough I kneaded the matcha until it’s fully combined.

Then on the second I added the strawberries and a couple of pink food coloring drops.

Afterwards I divided each portion into 4 pieces and rolled them into dangos (balls). Lots of dividing going on here and once again, my kitchen scale was very handy and made sure all the dangos have equal measurements 💯👍🏻 They look so cute 🥰

Now time to cook it in boiling water.

It didn’t take that long to cook. According to the recipe, the dangos are cooked once they all started to float. However, my boyfriend told me to let it cook a couple more minutes because that’s when it starts cooking through. He has made dangos before so I took his word.

While the balls were cooking, I had an ice pack in a bowl of water ready for the transfer. When the dangos were cooked, I removed the ice pack and transferred them into the cold water to cool it down.

Afterwards it’s time to thread the dangos into the bamboo skewers (on a matching Totoro plate too 😄). Putting in the first one was a little tricky since it kind of sticks, but the following two are much easier once it’s broken in.

Shortly after, the Dangos 🍡 are now served!  They look so freaking 💕adorable 💕

How is it taste-wise? I knew the freeze-dried strawberry was off! It was like eating strawberries with rice 😓 As for the others, there wasn’t really much flavor. I couldn’t really taste the matcha even though it’s green 😕

Then again, dangos usually taste bland since its mostly rice flour. Thankfully this can be improved. We simply added anko (sweet red bean paste) and kinako (roasted soybean flour). We alternated between the two and the anko really helped the strawberry dangos. You can usually eat strawberries with anko, but not mixed in with the rice flour by itself. That was just so weird… 😥

What’s my assessment on this recipe? While this was really fun to make, I would do the regular white dangos and just use anko, kinako, or mitarashi (sweet soy sauce glaze). To me those taste much better.