Strawberry Rice Cakes (GIVE ONLY TO A PERSON WHOME YOU LOVE)

Ingredients

-Dough for 3-4 strawberry rice cakes

Glutinous rice flour (찹쌀가루, Chapssalgaru) - 1 cup
Water - 2/3 cup
Salt - 1/2 tsp
White sugar - 8 tsp
-Red bean paste for 25-30 rice cakes

Red beans (팥, pat) - 250 g
Water - 6 cups
Salt - 1 tsp
Honey - 50 ml
White sugar - 2 tsp (You might want to add more sugar if you want a fairly sweet taste. Mine wasn’t as sweet as the ones from a shop)
Water - 1 cup
-Strawberries (rinsed, stem off, and dried) - same as the number of rice cakes you are going to make.

-Some starch powder (anti sticky purpose, I used it a lot. I only had potato starch, but a rice starch may be better).

Steps (for red bean paste)
Rinse the red beans. Put the red beans in a pot and add the water (6 cups).
Simmer it until they turn out to be easily crushable. (I boiled it for 40 minutes and the paste turned out to be a bit rough still. So if you want to make really fine red bean paste you need to boil it a lot longer with more water. )
Take out the beans, leave them to cool down for 5 minutes and put them into a mixer.
Blend them.
Add the water (1 cup), honey, white sugar, and salt. Blend it again.
Put the blended red bean paste into a pot or wok and dry it on medium to low heat until the moisture evaporates enough so it is a paste.
Steps (for dough, you will need a microwave)

Sieve the glutinous rice flour, salt and sugar two times.
Add the water and mix them well (it will now look like milk).
Put it into a microwavable container.
Cook it on high for 3 minutes in a microwave. (I don’t know how your microwave works, but that is how I did it. The purpose is to make it doughy)
Take out the container and stir it well.
Put it back to the microwave and repeat steps 4 and 5 two times more. (So, you use the microwave for a total of 9 minutes.)
Let it cool for 5 minutes.
Spread well some starch powder on a plate (cover the plate throughly) and pour out the dough from the container. Put the starch powder onto the dough so that it doesn’t stick on your hand.
Divide the dough into 3-4 pieces.
Final steps

Spread the dough on your hand and add the red bean paste and a strawberry on top.
Seal it.
Serve it on the plate. (You need to eat it within 2 hours after you make it. Otherwise the dough will go soggy.)