Modak holds a settled place in Hindu tradition as Ganesha's favorite food, a status repeated often enough in popular story and temple practice that the sweet and the deity are rarely pictured apart, Ganesha's own images frequently show him holding a modak in one hand or with a plate of them set before him. One widely told story has Ganesha's mother, Parvati, or in some versions the sage Kubera, offering him modak as a reward, and Ganesha eating so many that he can barely move afterward, and then, in the best known version of the tale, mounting his vahana, the mouse Mushika, to travel home only for the mouse to stumble on a passing snake, spilling Ganesha onto the ground; the moon, seeing this and laughing, is cursed by Ganesha for its mockery, an episode some traditions use to explain the practice of avoiding looking at the moon on Ganesh Chaturthi night.
The sweet itself is made by steaming or, in a variant called fried modak, deep frying a dumpling of rice or wheat flour dough filled with grated coconut, jaggery and sometimes cardamom or nuts, shaped into a distinctive rounded point at the top that has become as recognizable a symbol of the festival as Ganesha's own image. Some regional variants use semolina or khoya, a dried milk solid, instead of a plain rice or wheat flour dough, though the coconut and jaggery filling stays constant across nearly all of them.