Denpasar, In the City

Pasung, Balinese Cookies Having Cone Form

‘Jaja pasung’ is a traditional Balinese Cookie having a cone form with a sweet taste. It is a product made of creeping yam, mixed with rice flour and containing sugar enclosed in banana leafs in cone form. Most of the cookies are products made by rural communitys but marketed also in cities and traditional markets in Pasar Badung, Pasar Satria, Pasar Kreneng, etc. The cookies are also on sale in cake shops of Denpasar, while in Tabanan Regency consumers might see the cookies in markets at Pasar Tabanan, in Pasar Marga, Pasar Baturiti and Pasar Kediri.

Formerly, during religious holidays such as Nyepi, Galungan, Kuningan, and other traditional rituals such as paying off promises, people prefer to make jaja pasung to decorate the banten offerings. There is also economical consideration of suppressing budgets by means of offerings produce from plantations to express thanks to God. Such offerings contain ethical consideration just to repay God’s blessings for the crops, said Ida Ayu Ariani, a mother of one child from Jagapati, Abiansemal Sub-Regency, Badung.
Mrs. Ariani also said that at present there are many people excessively proud of their capacity able to offer jaja pasung during the holidays, and to buy just the colorful cakes easily bought in self-service shops because of practical considerations. Yet, many Balinese are able to make pasung cookies. Thus, it would be not difficult to find people who could tell the way to prepare the cookies.
One of them is Mrs. Ida Ayu Ariani, born in Tabanan in 1971, and now living with husband Ketut Suarjaya (also an artist) Jagapati village, Badung Regency. According to her story, one needs one kilogram of sweet potatoes, ½ ounce of cassava flour, and a bit salt. The way to prepare the cookies is as follows: Firstly, clean the sweet potatoes from soil remnant before cooking the material. Secondly, the potatoes are to be refined first before pounded and mixed with cassava flour to gain a delicious taste. During the process of pounding the sweet potato, salt is be added, while palm sugar is sliced into smaller pieces. The pounded cassava material get the form of smaller balls and filled with palm sugar. At last, we prepare banana leafs to enclose the cakes. The packaging of the cakes gets support by the palm leaf stick. Then follows the cooking of the cakes for about 15 minutes, and at last the pasung cookies are taken off the fire and cooled before being served to the table after c.a. 5 to 10 minutes of cooling.(BTN/Arsa)