The Tradition of Making Dodol Cake

Hello, everyone. I would like to share my day making a traditional cake called dodol in a small village in North Bali where my wife grew up.

Every six months, we celebrate a holiday called Galungan day. It's the day we go to the temple to pray and thank God for the prosperity blessed upon us. There are quite a number of preparation to do starting from making offerings, food, and traditional cakes. In this article, I will share about making a traditional cake called "dodol" .

In the morning, my parents in law prepared black rice and white sticky rice as the based ingredient of the dodol cake. It's a mix of about 1 kilogram of white sticky rice with half a kilo of black rice.

Black rice and white sticky rice.

We brought this mixed rice to a flour mill to turn this into flour. We mixed the flour with some water then we put it aside because there were few other things to prepare.

To make the dodol cakes required coconut milk. Since coconut is easy to find, we made the coconut milk ourselves. We peeled five coconuts, get the coconut out, and grated all of them.

Removing the coconut husks.

The coconuts after being extracted from their shells.

Another ingredient we prepared was sugar, brown palm sugar, and white sugar. The palm sugar had to be boiled until it melted so it could be mixed seamlessly with the flour that we prepared earlier, and the coconut milk.

The coconuts were grated, and mixed with water to make coconut milk.

Heating palm sugar to melt it.

Liquied palm sugar.

Coconut milk.

Adding the palm sugar to the coconut milk.

Mixing the coconut milk and palm sugar on little fire.

The flour (black rice and white sticky rice) was about to be mixed together.

Next, we mixed everything: the flour, the palm sugar, and the coconut milk.
We moved the stove outside our small kitchen. Cooking the dodol would need a long time, about 2 hours, and we had to keep on stirring. So, it's better to do it outside.

When everything was mixed on the pan, it was time to cook it in little fire for 2 hours.

We stirred it in turn for two hours, so it's better to have good conversation when cooking.

From brown color, the dodol turned into a darker color. This was the sign that it was well cooked.

We added some white sugar because the palm sugar usually is not enough for sweetener. It's more for giving an aroma than the taste.

adding some white sugar.

It turned darker, and it was well cooked.

Finally, the dodol was ready. We took it out from the pan. But this was not the end of the story. We need to wrap the dodol with corn husk. We got the corn husk from a neighbor who was kind to give it to us in return for dodol cakes.

Corn husks for wrapping the dodol.

In the evening, we started to wrap the dodol with corn husk. For each wrapping, we put a spoonful of dodol. Then we tied the wrapping with plastic rope.

In the end, we tidied up the dodol wrappings by cutting the excess ropes and corn husk to make them look better.

That's the long journey of making dodol cakes which could last about a month.

The making of dodol was long and tedious, but we really enjoy making it. It's a tradition that brings the family together.