Traditions / Seasons & holidays / Halloween Capsicum Carving
KIND
Annualy
WHERE
Kitchen
HOW LONG
1 hour
AGES
Any age
IN THE COLLECTION
Nº 008
AN ANNUAL TRADITION
Halloween Capsicum Carving
the jack-o'-lantern you get to eat
Everyone carves a face into their own capsicum. Then you stuff them, bake them, and eat Halloween dinner by candlelight with a table full of grinning little lanterns. No pulp, no knife wrestling, and no pumpkin.
A jack-o'-lantern that ends up
on the dinner table instead of in the bin.
HOW IT WORKS
01
Everyone picks a capsicum
One each, and they choose it themselves. Orange ones make the best mini jack-o'-lanterns, but a red devil or a green goblin is just as welcome. Slice the top off to make a lid and pull out the seeds. That's ten seconds of work, not ten minutes of scooping.
02
Carve the faces
Draw the face on with a marker first. Little ones draw and a grown-up does the cutting. Older kids can use a small paring knife. Keep the holes small, because the walls are thin and the filling needs somewhere to stay.
03
Stuff and bake
Fill them with your family's go-to filling: mince and rice, cheesy pasta, whatever everyone will actually eat. Put the lids back on and bake at 180°C for about half an hour, until they're soft and the cheese is bubbling out of the eyes.
04
Lights off, candles on
Line them up on the table, turn the lights off and light the candles. Everyone eats the one they made. There will be cheese dripping out of mouths, and someone will insist theirs is the scariest. Then it's out for trick-or-treating, or not.
Stand them in a muffin tin so they don't topple over in the oven. Get a photo of the line-up before anyone takes a bite.
WHY IT WORKS
Making the face was always the best part of Halloween. This keeps that and ditches the rest.
Pumpkin carving promises a lot. What you usually get is an hour of cold pulp, a knife that won't go through, a kid who wandered off after the first scoop, and a pumpkin that's collapsing on the doorstep by Tuesday. Capsicums keep the good bit, which is everyone making their own face, and skip straight to the reward. Twenty minutes of carving, half an hour in the oven, and the thing they made is dinner.
Halloween night is usually a sugar-fuelled blur, and this turns part of it into a proper sit-down moment together. The candlelight does most of the work. If you're in the southern hemisphere, where pumpkins are months out of season come October, you also don't have to hunt the supermarket for an overpriced pumpkin.
Even kids who swear they hate capsicum have a funny habit of eating the one with their own face on it.
MAKE IT YOURS
Make it fit your family
Pass down the filling
Pick one family recipe and make it the Halloween filling every year. Maybe it's Nana's mince or the pasta bake nobody's allowed to change. The kids help make it, and one day they'll make it for their own kids.
Hand out awards
Scariest, silliest, and most likely to collapse in the oven. Everyone votes before the first bite, and the winner blows out the candles at the end of the night.
Optional keepsake
photograph the line-up in the same spot every year. By the time they're teenagers, you'll have a whole row of Halloweens told in little capsicum faces.
FREE PRINTABLE
Everything you need except the capsicums
Print it before Halloween and stick it on the fridge. The face sheet puts an end to the "I don't know what to do" standoff. The recipe card makes sure the family filling gets written down. The award tags mean everyone's creation gets a moment of glory before it gets eaten.
- Six faces to copy, from easiest to tricky, so even the littlest carver can do one
- Draw-your-own capsicums, so everyone can try their face on paper first
- Our Halloween filling, a recipe card with a row to tick off each year you make it
- The Capsicum Awards, four cut-out tags for Scariest, Silliest, Most likely to collapse in the oven, and Best in show
FREE. NO ACCOUNT. STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX.
