Sake and Takoyaki

We have been watching a lot of NHK TV and have been salivating over the Japanese street food called takoyaki. Takoyaki are little puff balls of batter stuffed with a piece of octopus (tako), green onions, and pickled ginger. The ideal takoyaki should have a crispy exterior and melt-in-your-mouth interior. We talked about the appropriate equipment to make the takoyaki, looked online and saw a bunch of griddles for making takoyaki, but the expense of getting a takoyaki griddle just didn't seem to justify indulging this food fetish of ours until eureka! we thought of using our granddaughter's babycakes cake pop maker. It would be a few weeks before we could get our hands on her cake pop maker, but once we did, it was takoyaki here we come!
It turns out that there are a number of Youtube videos detailing how to use a cake pop maker to make takoyaki. So, yesterday, we went on a hunt for ingredients and instead of octopus, we decided to use shrimp. My husband made the batter, fired up the babycakes and began making the ebi(shrimp)yaki.

This was how the finished product looked and trust me, it was as good as it looks!:

The appropriate beverage with ebiyaki is sake. We had a bottle of sake in our wine cave and needless to say, it was the perfect pairing. This sake is Dewazakura Omachi "Jewel Brocade". The label on the back said that the sake is made from the ancestral strain of rice called omachi, from which all sake making rice is descended. Dewazakura is located in Yamagata Prefecture in the Japanese Alps. The brewery has been making sake since 1893!
This sake is a Junmai Ginjo. (I had to refresh my memory on what "junmai" means - "Junmai means that the sake was made with rice, water and koji. If the label doesn't say 'Junmai' and has only something like 'Dai Ginjo', then the sake can have added alcohol.") With just three ingredients in the making of a junmai sake, all of the ingredients must be perfect. My winter research last year was all about how sake is made. It is truly a laborous process!
If you are interested in reading more about sake making, here are the blogpost, which is really a condensed version of the process:
Sake Making
How is Sake Made?---The Rice
How is Sake Made?---The Water
How is Sake Made?---The Koji
How is Sake Made?—-The Yeast
How is Sake Made?—-The Fermentation

References:
1. Dewazakura.