Japanese Autumn and Halloween Sweets

Although it is still pretty early in the "Halloween season" here in Japan you can already get some Halloween-themed foods in supermarkets and sweet shops. Besides that, you can also find yummy autumn-themed traditional Japanese sweets that use seasonal flavours like chestnut and sweet potatoes.

I would like to introduce what I have tried so far this autumn / Halloween season.

Pokémon Pan Halloween version

This year you can get two different versions of Halloween-themed snack bread -- one is a pumpkin-flavoured doughnut and the other a pumpkin-flavoured melon pan.

Both come in a cute Halloween-themed package featuring a dressed-up Pikachu. I only tried the melon pan so far and was not impressed by the taste. I hardly tasted any pumpkin flavour. It was almost a normal melon pan. But as this type of snack bread is quite cheap in Japan you probably can't expect much anyway.

The Halloween Pokémon Pan is available in most supermarkets and comes with a random Pokémon sticker that unfortunately is not Halloween-themed.

Mister Donut Halloween Doughnuts

Mister Donut already started selling their Halloween themed doughnuts for 2020.

This year you can choose from 5 different doughnuts that look like ghosts, bats, mummies, and cats.  I tried the pink mummy and the ghost doughnut.

The mummy doughnut is a fruit stick with strawberry taste and the ghost doughnut is covered in white chocolate and coconut flakes. Both have no filling. They did not taste bad but not exactly amazing either. I did like the mummy doughnut better but they basically had no Halloween twist to their flavour and could have been sold as normal doughnuts if not for the chocolate eyes.

They are priced at around 150 yen each and have been available since September 4.

Sweet Potato Set from the Supermarket

I got this sweet potato sweets set from a local supermarket. It contained sweet potato cakes and daifuku. The cakes were filled with regular anko and the daifuku with sweet potato anko. I like both but if you are not a fan of sweet potato flavour you might want to stay away from sweets like this. If you do like the taste, there are more variants of sweet potato daifuku that you can try out, e.g. ones that are filled with whipped cream or ice.

Chestnut Mochi from the Supermarket

This set of chestnut mochi is also from a local supermarket. They are cut in small pieces, so they were easy to eat. They were filled with chestnut-anko which tastes nothing like regular anko. They might be a nice alternative for those that don’t like the taste of anko.

Unfortunately, when it comes to autumn sweets most are either chestnut or sweet potato flavour so if you don’t like these tastes you might want to wait until the winter season starts.

So far the Halloween-themed sweets I've tried in Japan were a little underwhelming but a lot of places have not yet started with their Halloween menu yet, therefore I am hopeful to find something nice in the future. Until then I might stick to the Japanese-style sweets.

Have you found anything nice so far?