Hanami dango, as its name suggests, is dango that is enjoyed during cherry blossom season. It features three chewy, tender rice balls on a stick. Each skewer will have a green rice ball, a white one, and a pink one, in that order. The colours resemble the arrival of the spring season!
Add soft tofu and stir with a rubber spatula. Mix until it is evenly combined.
Divide the dough evenly into three smaller bowls.
Add matcha powder to one portion. Add freeze-dried strawberry powder powder to the second portion while leaving the third portion plain. Mix until the powders are evenly distributed.
Dust your hands with rice flour (to prevent the dough from sticking to your hands) and roll out little dumplings. You want to get about 8 dumplings per colour. Place rolled dumplings on a plate.
In a medium-sized pot, bring water to a boil. Once the water is boiling, turn down the heat to medium and drop in the dumplings. Stirring occasionally, cook until the dumplings float to the top of the water, about 10 minutes. It is important that you keep stirring to prevent the dumplings from sticking to the bottom of the pot.
While the dumplings are cooking, fill a large bowl with cold water. Once the dumplings are floating and fully cooked, remove the dumplings from the pot with a slotted spoon and transfer them into the cold water.
Once the dumplings have cooled, put one dumpling of each colour onto a skewer, in the order of green, white, and pink.
Serve the day they are made and at room temperature.
Notes
For Hanami dango: you can play around of your ratio of glutinous rice flour to joshinko rice flour until you reach the consistency and texture that you like. Traditionally, hanami dango is made with mostly joshinko/regular rice flour, but I like to use a bit more of the glutinous rice flour than regular rice flour so the dumplings are more tender and chewy. Sometimes there are recipes for dango on the back the bags of joshinko flour. You can follow those steps too!