I’m not entirely sure of the origins of the holiday, but it’s at least 15 years old, and it seems to be driven by the Lotte corporation, a major retailer in Korea that is the primary producer of pepero sticks. Some people may be more familiar with the Japanese version called Pocky (which came first I believe), but in Korea it’s pepero, or 빼빼로 day.
It’s a brilliant marketing move, really. The date 11/11 looks like 4 sticks of pepero (well, five if you count the slash or dash)! People (mostly students, but some adults too) buy boxes and boxes of pepero to give to one’s beloved or to friends and family. I asked what they thought of pepero day, and the loudest students agreed: “Teacher, sad day!! ㅠ_ㅠ” (<--that’s a “crying a lot” emoticon, Korean-style) So I guess it’s like Valentine’s Day is for single people or something like that, another day for the have-nots to feel left out. But regardless, pepero day was coming, and the massive displays in stores, subways, and outside shops along the streets made the upcoming day impossible to miss. Since this year had an extra "11" it was even bigger than usual, promoted with signs and labels announcing "millennium pepero day." Here's a display I saw outside Sadang station in Seoul.
My friend Aimee decided that she wanted to make pepero herself for her co-teachers at school, and invited me to make pepero with her. This would involve buying the biscuit sticks pre-made, melting chocolate and dipping the sticks, then decorating the pepero and wrapping them up in individual packages for the teachers. I love making baked goods, handmade gifts, etc., but a lot of times there just aren’t good opportunities or access to supplies, but supplies were no problem! Availability wasn’t a problem anyway—actually getting to the available goods was a little harder. The baker’s market in Seoul seemed like a good solution and I was due for another trip there anyway.
What a mistake to go to the baker’s market on the day when 3rd grade high schoolers were taking their life-changing college entrance exams and all the other high school students got the day off…! There were crowding teenagers in hordes pressed into the tiny alleyway between the Euljiro and Jongno areas of Seoul. One of the best ingredient stores in the market is a corner store with sliding glass doors on two sides. Outside this store I saw a phenomenon I have rarely experienced in Korea: people lining up in a queue (and without cutting in front) to get somewhere. This was pretty impressive, I thought.
Two store employees were stationed at each door blocking people from pressing in until shoppers already inside finished and left to make more room. It was quite an experience! I bought some pepero sticks and a couple of flavors of melting chocolates. One was a dark chocolate, and the other one was… green. No one was going for those green packages, so of course I dove into the crowd and got two. Why not? One store employee was standing in the doorway collecting cash as passing back goods—I think he was just exclusively selling the pepero sticks so if that was all customers wanted, they didn’t have to wait in line to get them.
Clutching my purchases tightly so they didn’t get pulled away or trampled by the press of the crowd, I headed home to get started on the pepero making that evening. I still needed to go shopping with Aimee at our favorite local craft store too, and we both got some more chocolate, sticks, sprinkles, gift bags, and other items. Here’s a look at what we started with.
We settled on making the sticks on my house since I have ever so slightly more surface area for working on, and I had a lot of baking supplies already like a small saucepan for melting the chocolate, cooling racks, and wax paper. After tasting the chocolates in the name of science, we found that the green one turned out to be a mild green apple flavor. It sounds weird, but combined with two flavors of regular chocolate, it made an amazing and delicious combination. The first batch didn’t come out so well. It melted nicely, and then we decided to add some heavy cream to the mix. Apparently that was too much fat for the chemical reactions in the saucepan to handle and it all congealed almost immediately. So I’ve got a solid brick of melt-in-your-mouth chocolate-something in my fridge now.
It was a disaster, but we really enjoyed the process anyway. It sort of had the feeling of making Christmas cookies, full of fun and warm holiday cheer thinking of the smiles you'd get to bring to people's faces. The second batch cooked much better, and we quickly figured out an assembly line for drizzling on the chocolate, moving it from the stove to the table with a chair in between, and then decorating with sprinkles and things at the final stage. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it turned out pretty well. You can see some of the works in progress, and some of the trays as they started to fill up.
Here’s the finished result! We ended up making exactly 111 pepero sticks, without even trying for that number! They peeled off the wax paper perfectly, and I love how they looked all finished and decorated. We might have had to finish off the odd few that didn’t divide into packages as well. ;)
Two days later, the big day arrived: 11/11/11! It was time to make the presentations. Aimee’s birthday also happened to be 11/11/11, so in addition to being a popular teacher at her school, she received a lot of extra birthday pepero. ^_^ Some of the teachers in my office seemed almost apologetic that they hadn’t prepared or gotten me any pepero, but a few teachers were ready, and one teacher actually pre-empted me by giving me a box of pepero about 5 or 10 minutes after I got there that morning. She's such a nice lady! No pepero from students (though they asked me for some, even tried “trick or treat” on me a couple of times), but I did get a few other gifts from parents, officemates and co-teachers. Here’s my yield from this year.
Pepero day was fun, though the downside is lots and lots of pepero wrappers and boxes littering the sidewalks and roads for the next few days.
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