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Japan’s Vampire Smoothie arrives with semi-coagulated blood looks for Halloween【Taste test】

Casey Baseel Sep 28, 2024
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Saint Marc Cafe celebrates Halloween with new gruesome-looking smoothie and Jack-o’-Lantern sweet potato croissants.

In Japan, a lot of Halloween festivities have a cute, whimsical touch to them. That even goes for the color palette. More often than not, Halloween-themed decorations and items will make generous use of a fashionably festive shade of purple, with the more traditional and ominous black and orange relegated to secondary and tertiary roles.

And yeah, sure enough, Japanese cafe chain Saint Marc Cafe has released a purple sweet potato smoothie for Halloween…but they’ve also released a Vampire Smoothie that looks equal parts depraved and delicious.

Oftentimes in vampire imagery, the blood they drink is likened to red wine, a watery, darkly colored liquid to be sipped from a gothic goblet. But since Saint Marc Cafe has made a smoothie for vampires, the “blood” here is quite a bit pulpier, with a semi-coagulated vibe.

▼ It’s served with a syringe-style dropper filled with “Vampire Syrup.”

Of course, seeing as how blood-sucking undead make up, at most, only a small percentage of Saint Marc Cafe’s clientele, there’s no genuine hemoglobin in the Vampire Smoothie. The beverage base is Japanese pear (sweeter and moister than Western pears), and its white color serves to create a strong, and strongly unsettling, contrast with the grape gelatin, which plays the role of the mass of blood at the bottom of the cup. The Vampire Syrup, meanwhile, is a liquid sweetener with a deep, almost black purple color with mixes into a fresh-blood red as you squeeze it into the drink.

All of these come together perfectly, shocking your eyes and delighting your taste buds, our taste-testing Japanese-language reporter K. Masami says. The Vampire Smoothie is wonderfully fruity and refreshing, and if you find yourself getting too weirded out by how it looks, you can always just keep stirring everything together until they meld into a more conventionally pretty hue that wouldn’t look out of place in a tropical drink.

Appearing alongside the Vampire Smoothie for Saint Marc’s special Halloween lineup is the Premium Chocolate Croissant Anno Imo Jack-‘o-Lantern. Saint Marc Cafe is famous for their chocolate croissants, and these limited-time seasonal versions make use of Anno Imo, a prized variety of sweet potato grown in Kagoshima Prefecture.

Honestly, the Jack-‘o-Lantern croissants look a little more like zombies, or maybe severed fingers. Arguably inaccurate name aside, though, they do look like some sort of creepy creature (especially if you have the staff warm them up before eating like we did, making the chocolate eyes take on a distorted shape and liquidy consistency), so they still pass the test for being Halloween sweets.

Their color comes from mixing sweet potato powder in with the dough. Biting into one, we were met with the warm, slightly gooey goodness of the buttery sweet potato croissant and its filling of Anno Imo cream and chocolate.

So yes, the 690-yen (US$4.90) Vampire Smoothie and the 380-yen Premium Chocolate Croissant Anno Imo Jack-‘o-Lantern both look the part of Halloween treats and taste great too. They’re on sale now and will be available at Saint Marc Cafe branches across Japan until October 31. Oh, and if you’re headed to a Halloween party, expecting trick-or-treaters, o just like to keep your house well-stocked with snacks. the croissants are also available in a discounted five-pack for 1,700 yen.

Related: Saint Marc Cafe location finder
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[ Read in Japanese ]