During Ganesh Chaturthi, the ten day festival marking Ganesha's birth celebrated most elaborately in Maharashtra and across much of western and southern India, households and community pandals that install a clay image of Ganesha include modak among the offerings made to the deity each day, alongside flowers, incense and other sweets, following the same naivedya and prasadam structure recorded generally under Prasadam: the modak is offered first, understood to be accepted by the deity, and only then distributed and eaten. Twenty-one modak in particular is a customary number for a single day's offering in many households, tied to a story in which Ganesha is offered twenty-one modak by the sage Kubera and manages to eat nearly all of them before turning to a final one meant for himself.
Family kitchens in Maharashtra and Goa in particular treat the steaming and shaping of modak by hand as a skilled, valued kitchen task in its own right during the festival, and demonstrations of modak making skill have become part of the wider festival culture in some cities, alongside the immersion of the clay Ganesha image, visarjan, that closes the ten days; the sweet made for the god at the festival's opening and the sweet shared among family and neighbors afterward are, in both cases, the same modak.