After our disappointing chicken ribs lunch (see yesterday's post here), we got dessert from this lady in Chooncheon. She mixes sugar and baking soda, melts it over a fire and forms it into a hardened candy after indenting it with various shapes of things like stars, moons and other things.
The idea is that if you can break off (the Korean word for this action is "bbopgee", thus the name of the candy) the area around the shapes without breaking the shapes themselves, you get a free extra candy.
Myunghee tells how when she was young, she'd buy and take one home and then meticulously try to carve the shapes out with a needle so she could go back and get a free one. She says she was a success only one in ten times even back then, and we don't have the patience to play the game properly now so I've never actually won. Still, it seems that Myunghee has great memories of this candy when she was a kid because she never misses a chance to buy a few when we come across a "bbopgee" seller.
