Sweet Potatoes Make The Perfect Pint-Size Jack-O'-Lanterns

There are plenty of reasons a person might not want to dismember a whole darn pumpkin in the service of creating a jack-o'-lantern. Maybe the festive holiday DIY is just a little too time consuming at the moment. Maybe you don't yet know how to optimize roasted pumpkin seeds for maximum crispiness. Or maybe you simply prefer that your pumpkins are baked into a pie. Regardless, the earliest jack-o'-lanterns weren't even made out of pumpkins at all. And you can create a lower-lift version that's also a little bit closer to classically accurate with an everyday sweet potato.

You might have seen a smattering of recipes that use something like cookie cutters to stamp out jack-o'-lantern-inspired, flat, savory snacks. This is not that. Instead, it follows the same principles of pumpkin carving, just with a little more required hand-eye coordination, and a little less time, to create a similar finished product. And all you'll need is the spud and a few tools for topical tuber success.

Anyone who's ever picked a pack of sweet potatoes — or any other kind — for dinner knows how wildly they can vary in shape and size. You can try to identify the largest, roundest one you can for your lantern jack-ing. But the odds are that it'll still seem too oblong. Slice that baby in half, and continue on with the exposed, flat side oriented as the jack-o'-lantern's bottom. So, unlike a carved pumpkin, which typically ends up with a stemmed little hat, your sweet potato jack-o'-lantern's top will remain curved and smooth with peel.

You'll also need a sharp knife, a melon baller, and a highly scientific pokie thing, which can be a thin ice pick, a skewer, or virtually any awl. Advanced sweet potato jack-o'-lantern carvers might want to break out the utility craft knife to sculpt more advanced expressions. Beginners and experts alike can begin hollowing the sweet potato with the melon baller. Scoop in a gently firm clockwise motion, careful to remember that the potato's exterior is considerably more delicate and prone to tearing than a pumpkin's would be. Once it's a starchy cup, remember to turn it upside-down, and use the poker to punch basic eye shapes, like circles, squares, or triangles. Repeat with the nose and grin, still keeping it basic due to the botanical's small size and yielding composition. Once you've got something resembling cohesive features, pop in a tea light and bask in your creation like you're some kind of Frankenstein.