A Simple Black Sesame Cake For Chuseok

This Friday, a nearly full moon — a waxing gibbous, to be precise — will announce the arrival of Chuseok, the Korean mid-autumn festival. During the holiday, which translates to “autumn evening” and falls on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, Koreans across the world cook a banquet’s worth of food and eat it with their relatives.

In South Korea, where many young people leave their rural towns and flock to Seoul, the three-day public holiday is an opportunity to check in with their families. (Long traffic-jammed drives to grandma’s house or to the mountain where she is buried are as much a part of Chuseok as is eating rice cakes.) But the holiday, the second most important to Korean people after Seollal, the Lunar New Year, is also a moment for Koreans across the world to return to their culinary roots.

Preparation begins a few days before, with grocery shopping. Business at the family-owned Hansol Food, a Korean prepared foods store in Flushing, Queens, picks up heavily around this time of year, as busy parents — getting ready to host their children — stock up on traditional foods like banchan, various jeon (fritters and savory pancakes), fish, traditional sweets and other dishes essential to the feast.

But the auspicious half-moon-shaped fresh rice cakes called songpyeon (roughly pronounced SOHNG-pyuhn) are chief among the holiday’s joys.

Sarah Nam, a speech pathology student in Boston, remembers making songpyeon for the first time when she was young. Now, as an adult, she makes them at home if she has the time. Songpyeon are often filled with sesame seeds and honey, red bean paste or sweetened mung bean paste, but Ms. Nam prefers her own mix of cinnamon sugar and sesame seeds or roasted chestnuts.

It’s “a really fun activity to do with friends and family,” Ms. Nam said. “It’s a nice way to share a little background about Korean heritage to non-Korean folks.” But she’s a bit of a rarity.

The trickiest part about making your own at home may just be finding mepssalgaru, a nonglutinous short-grain rice flour, needed to form the dough. This particular flour, often found in the freezer aisle, isn’t the same as glutinous rice flour, sweet rice flour or the mochiko you might use for butter mochi. But, in fact, when you can’t get your hands on the mepssalgaru needed for songpyeon, you can turn mochiko into a big, chewy black sesame rice cake instead.

Many Korean families tend to pick up premade songpyeon for the holiday. My own would bring them home from church, and these days, I pick up a packet or two at H Mart. But while I might not be making handmade songpyeon, I do get invited to a lot of parties around this time and like to bring a cake.

This simple yet regal cake contains the flavors of songpyeon, thanks to honey, roasted black sesame seeds and rice flour. The cake batter’s density forces the celestial black sesame crumble upward to form a perfect black line that acts like a sweet, nutty brittle atop the squidgy vanilla base. It doesn’t hurt either that it looks like a big, fat moon.

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