All About Japan

6 Adorable Japanese-Style Halloween Recipes

Video Halloween Autumn Cuisine

YouTuber Ochikeron has already stolen our hearts with her bento and ramen recipes—and her Halloween ideas have only served to solidify her vampiric hold over us. These dishes are just too cute not to gobble down!

6. Halloween Skull Toast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuzNT0-fawY

The keys here are hard-boiled eggs, pizza sauce and processed cheese. Of course, the sandwiches could be basically anything, but cutting off the crusts goes a long way to maintaining that ossified feel. The faces are made using the classic bento drawing tool of carefully cut nori seaweed sheets, and Ochikeron offers a few final words on how to make your seaweed skulls look properly skully.

5. Jack-O'-Lantern Onigiri Rice Balls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34AZzQ2axos

Give your rice an orange hue by mixing it into a frying-pan combination of chicken, mushrooms and ketchup. If you don't have time for that, just use orange rice seasoning. The final step: plastic bags, twist ties and sheets of nori seaweed to make the faces!

4. Pumpkin & Carrot Steamed Buns for Babies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RufT58kRgco

Ochikeron builds off a Japanese steamed buns mix, but you can also follow the in-video link to learn how to make it all from scratch. Throw pumpkin baby food on top to ensure that your little ghoul or goblin will gobble it down! Watch on to see how it fares in the face of an actual baby!

3. Jack-O'-Lantern Deviled Eggs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1sfkgNCD5k

Ochikeron doesn't do anything halfway, and here she goes all the way to offering tips for making the perfect hard-boiled egg—even down to an easy shell-cracking technique. The seasoning is made from mayonnaise, sugar, vinegar, onion, canned tuna, salt and pepper, with the mashed egg yolks added in at the end. Paprika powder deepens the color, with the requisite nori facial features appied with tweezers at the end. Watch to find out what the stems are made from!

2. Jack-O'-Lantern Sushi Balls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qmO97CDToQ

This one starts with avocado sushi rice, with Ochikeron even explaining how to make good sushi vinegar to ensure that your rice is properly sticky. That bright red color is—you guessed it—smoked salmon! The key is to use plastic wrap to shape the salmon and rice into a ball, followed by the usual hand-cut nori facial details. The spider webs? Those are made with mayonnaise!

1. Mummy Ebi Tempura Udon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J_HeKJM4JI

This one's a little more complicated, but worth the effort—and you'll even learn how to make regular ebi (shrimp) tempura on the way, complete with deveining and anti-splatter tips!

Ochikeron uses cream cheese to glue a roll of nori to her tempura fried shrimp, then relies on the natural stickiness of semi-dry udon to hold it in place. Slices of cheese cut out with a big bubble tea straw form the eyeballs, with each filled in by a punched circle of nori. Can you say adorable? We can! Now we just have to resist this inexplicable urge to play Splatoon ...