Serious Eats
Gallery of Rice Cakes from Seoul's 7th International Tteok Fair
If you think of rice cakes as only being round or block-shaped, you're...right about most of them. But at the 7th International Tteok Fair in Seoul, South Korea, there were more! So many more! For the rice cake competition, contestants made elaborate dishes that, unfortunately, only the judges could eat, but they provided plenty of eye-candy for the rest of us. Since there were too many for me to include in my overview of the fair, I separated my favorites into this gallery.
Many of the tteok dishes were make to look like other things. This South Korean flag, for one.
And colorful lollipops.
A few Lilliputian crepes.
Little vegetable rolls that reminded me of nubby uncut kimbap.
And there were dishes made to look like living things, such as these pandas, bunnies, and penguins.
Little Red Riding Hood, or perhaps some other random young girl wearing a hooded red cap.
Winnie the Pooh!
Other yellow bears that are not Winnie the Pooh!
Little cakes were also popular.
As were big cakes. There were ones that looked like typical American-style layered cakes.
Along with plenty of multi-tired cakes.
And super multi-tired.
On the other end of the multi-tired tteok cake spectrum, dainty flowers made multiple appearances.
A lovely heart-shaped bed of rice-based flowers.
Photograph by Soo Hyang Choi
The dainty flower them was featured in one of the grand prize winning dishes (which I unfortunately didn't get a photo of) by Rie Tamaoka, a Japanese woman who studies at the Institute of Traditional Korean Food.
