Sarad
Balinese Cake Prepared for Offerings

Hindu Balinese customarily prepare lavish amounts of cakes as part and parcel of offerings to celebrate on religious holy days. Among the cakes represented for the occasion, the biggest is sarad, a Sanskrit word which etymologically presents the concept of food. This is a specific big-size cake offered to gods in a ritual, both at home and in holy places. Both families offering the sarads and other participants attending the ceremonial event, might not take these specific cakes in as common physical food, popular among Balinese in general as jaja. Nevertheless, Balinese have felt spiritually rewarded following the sarad offerings during the ritual.

Many families produce sarad cakes, otherwise they have an alternative of just going to the market place to purchase them, because of professional demands in governmental, agricultural, private and business offices technical workplaces, or just for lacking the know-how of preparing the cakes themselves. Even in rural areas such as Kubutambahan and Bondalem located in East Buleleng respectively, 12 and 21 km from Singaraja, the capital of Buleleng Regency, many people have taken it easy preferring to go to the market place to buy sarad.
Pura Meduwe Karang temple located in Kubutambahan has been known among Dutch and other foreign tourists and painters, who since 1920 have made stops there on their way to Kintamani, Tampaksiring and Sanur Beach. The temple has become a place of interest for foreign tourists, especially Dutch and foreign artists arriving at Buleleng Harbor by ships managed by KPM Dutch Royal Steamship Company throughout the Indonesian archipelago.
The temple has been characteristic because of Kubutambahan’s location at a strategic road junction where means of transportation from Menyali, Sawan Sub-Regency, go through to the Klungkung Marketplace at dawn in order to prevent arriving back home late in the day and empty-handed after having dropped commodities produced by the Menyali’s craftsmen. The traders are skilled in manufacturing cooking utensils.
Otherwise, Menyali’s traditional dancers and gamelan ensembles have been famous in the eyes of Buleleng Regency’s public because of their participation at Buleleng Regency’s level since earlier times. The second reason why Kubutambahan has a strategic position in transportation link is the rush of buses and trucks moving along the street traversing from Amlapura (Karangasem Regency) to Java through Kubutambahan, Singaraja, Gilimanuk, and Banyuwangi (Java).
The uniqueness of the Pura Meduwe Karang temple lies in the fact that it shows to the visitors a row of big-size statues much higher than an average human, repaired by local sculptor Kaki (Grandpa) Jineng at the end of the ninth century. Kaki Jineng was a famous sculptor ranked-high among Buleleng Kingdom’s artist colleagues.
One of his descendants, Kaki Tamu (30) tells in the 1940s, many instances when all Buleleng sculptors gathered in Singaraja for artistic work on instructions sent by the King to install a big statue in the Royal Palace. Kaki Jineng’s colleagues firstly looked on the Kubutambahan sculptor at work after finishing a statue design measuring much higher than the designer itself.
Such stories of Kaki Jineng often reflect how dignified his position in the eyes of the Buleleng’s King, resulting in pride not only among those blood-related descendants of the sculptor, but Kaki Jineng becoming highly popular among highly qualified artists in Buleleng long after the old man’s death. Kaki Tamu himself an active sculptor had performed restorations and repairs to many temples in and around Kubutambahan, including the most important temple of Pura Bale Agung, which is under auspices of the Chief of the Traditional Village Desa Adat Kubutambahan. A second craftsman always assisted him at work.
At the other extreme, food offerings may take the form of huge towers of fruits, meats, eggs and cakes, all skewered with bamboo sticks into a central stem of a banana plant. In some conditions and some villages, these tall-sized offerings, banten tegeh, are perhaps two or more meters high. They are usually prepared at home and carried to the temple on the heads of the women who made them for religious blessings by the pemangku in charge. The banten tegeh dedicated to God and His manifestations as defied ancestors, expressing thanks from those who made them.
Once the temple priest has blessed the offerings and sprinkled people who made the offerings with holy water, post-offered cakes are carried back home and eaten, especially by younger members of the family. High Priests and some pemangkus do not eat offerings. Nevertheless, the average Balinese does so with relish.
The Balinese save their most beautiful, delicate and colorfully decorative cakes for these high offerings. Jaja uli is the favorite, made of steamed glutinous rice dough and palm sugar, usually wrapped in a cylindrical bundle of coconut leaves. When it is finished, the cook cuts it off in slices with a bamboo thread.
Other cakes are also offered on the occasion, including jaja gipang (made of sticky rice grains), jaja gegodoh biu (fried banana covered with rice flour), very decorative gerinda (made of rice dough), jaja matanai (round, red, fried cake, resembling the sun), sirat (very lacy cake), bantal (long thin cake wrapped with a spiral of coconut leafs) and jaja apem (very similar to a cupcake).
On very specially occasions, cookies are made of colored rice dough into symbolic religious scenes and these are fried and attached to huge rattan or bamboo frames, making symbolic representations of the Balinese universe, showing the earth borne on the back of the world turtle, all done with cookies. The sarad cakes depict huge human creations remain intact in the offering within the temple for many days.
Many cakes are needed for special ceremonial offerings and are made of glutinous rice grains stuck together and molded into various shapes, rather than rice flour. They are valid as offerings in an integral part of the Balinese Hindu religion. In general, food offerings take various shapes. In their simplest forms, they may be merely small baskets of fruits and cakes, with flowers, and always with three ingredients, betel chew, betel pepper leaf, areca nuts and lime – the symbol of Hindu Trisakti: Brahma, Wisnu, and Siwa. (Surawan, Bali Travel News associated editor)

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