You’ve probably seen people using condoms for all sorts of reasons other than what they were intended, but chances are you’ve never seen condoms being used in food preparation- until now.

Leave it to our fun loving friends in Japan to come up with a cookbook full of recipes that use a condom in preparation, spreading awareness about safe sex at the same time.

The Japanese cookbook Condom Meals I Want To Make For You by Kyosuke Kagami features eleven easy to prepare recipes like condom escargot cooked with butter, condom push sushi and there's even a recipe for "delicious" condom cookies.

The concept makes sense, in the simple boil in a bag kind of way, but each dish is formed into a rather unsavory shape, and they're bound to taste a bit rubbery, right?

-Via Kotaku

Nathan Shields, our favorite pancake artist, has already mastered frying pancakes that look like creatures and using stencils to decorate pancakes. Now he's tackling a new challenge: making functional musical instruments with that great breakfast food.

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Shields made a pancake with holes in the middle, then wrapped that pancake around a cylindrical mold. He sealed it with additional pancake batter and then placed a recorder mouthpiece in one end. Now it's a playable flute that his kids clearly love.

Traditional Japanese cuisine is prepared using simple ingredients elegantly plated. making many meals just as enjoyable to look at as they are to eat.

The Japanese are also world renowned connoisseurs of cute, and when cuteness and cuisine collide these dishes are created that are simply too adorable to devour!

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Nowadays, people from all over the world are inspired by the Japanese approach to cuisine preparation, and unsurprisingly many have also embraced the cuteness when creating their own fun visual feasts.

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Bored Panda invited their readers to submit images of culinary cuteness inspired by Japanese cuisine, and so far they've received 43 delightfully drool-worthy submissions that make mealtime an adorable adventure.

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Check out the rest of these Incredibly Cute Meals Inspired By Japanese Cuisine

Image Credits: Curtis Publications

The above photo is of a seafood mousse, shaped to look like an actual, smiling fish. The only way I could describe it would be to say if you approached a table where that exact dish was being served, you would walk into the room, look into its empty, smiling face, and if you had any sense of self-respect and self-preservation, would turn around and walk out immediately. But in the seventies, weird food creations like this were actually pretty common. It was a very strange time, people.

Take a gander at this list of the 12 weirdest retro recipes from Oddee. Honestly, they start off slow with the above mentioned abomination, but it only gets weirder and more gross and the list goes on. At one point, there is a recipe for a jello ring that is filled with prunes and covered in ice-cream. That sounds like something you would feed a terrorist to extract vital information.

The funny part is, people were actually making this stuff back then. Wait until you see the "meat-za". You can't unsee things like that. Hate to think how many lives were lost to these gastronomic nightmares.

Nash Ruin, The Vulgar Chef (content warning: foul language), made corn dogs over the weekend. He's turned this traditional county fair snack into a delicious breakfast. Ruin doesn't provide any details, but it appears that he garbed the dogs in layers of blueberry pancake mix and red velvet cake. Yummy!

As I am sure many of you know already, the guys over at Epic Meal Time are beasts. They put together meals that would cause most of us to go to the E.R. within an hour, and they do it time and time again. Heck, they even have an episode where they go to the doctor to show the effects these meals are (or oddly enough, aren't) having on their bodies.

Although we have posted a couple of Epic Meal Time bits here, I felt today was the perfect day for the All Bacon Burger, a meat monstrosity that will have you equal parts drooling and gagging. That is the beauty of Epic Meal Time: You run the full range that they do when you watch an episode. First, you get hungry. Then, you get kind of repulsed. Finally, you just feel tired. No, seriously, watch this and tell me I am wrong.

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While I can confidently say I do not have the intestinal fortitude to actually eat anything these guys make, it's still a riot to watch them do it. The real, underlying question now is, who is the first one of these guys to have a stroke? Seems inevitable when they make meat creations like this one.

Geoff Beattie stills lives in the Queensland, Australia, house where he grew up. Now 68, he’s had an eventful life: wooing his wife, Elaine, over her father’s objections, building a dairy farm, and raising children. A spine injury caused him to hand over the farm work to his wife while he cooked for the family for a while. Then Elaine developed leukemia, leaving him heartbroken, with four children when she died at age 38.

In the weeks and months after Elaine’s death, Geoff suffered insomnia and barely functioned by day. “I’d be lying there and I just couldn’t go to sleep,” he says. “So I hit the bottle a bit. I’d had it. I don’t know if I’d get depressed. I’d get … sad, drink half a bottle of brandy.” He points to his kitchen cupboard. “I’d have the whisky ­bottles lined up above me cupboard there.”

Then, late one strange and divine night as he lay awake, lost and sunk deep in the depths of longing and despair, Geoff Beattie was struck by a profound and persistent compulsion to make marmalade. He rose from his bed and walked to the kitchen. He reached for his wooden chopping board and a bag of oranges and, as his ­children slept, he began slowly and carefully ­slicing orange rinds well into the night. He cut those orange rinds with such out-of-body ­precision that they were thin enough to dissolve on the tongue. On the stovetop he reduced his cooking liquid with such tenderness and innate understanding that, come morning, Geoff had created a marmalade so pure and so clear, it looked like the dawn sun had chosen not to rise outside his kitchen window that day but inside the glass jar he held in his hand.  

Beattie continued making marmalade and jellies and cakes, which were so impressive he began entering them in contests. He’s now won the national Florence Morgan Memorial Prize for Rich Dark Fruit Cake four times! Read the melancholy yet fascinating story of Beattie’s life, and get the recipe for his award-winning fruitcake at the Weekend Australian Magazine. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Eddie Safarik)

(Photos: Krispy Kreme UK)

Be a pal and pick up a box of donuts while you're out, okay? This one will do nicely. In every way except one, it's the traditional way that Krispy Kreme packages its boxes of 1 dozen donuts: this box contains 200 dozen instead of just 1.

The box is 11 feet long and over 3 feet tall. You may need some help with it. And remember to lift with your legs, not your back.

Krispy Kreme's UK division made this special box of donuts (yes, sadly, these are not available for general purchase) as a prize for a contest. Some lucky person in the UK has secured an entire week's supply of donuts as a result.

-via First We Feast

I've never eaten horse before, but I'm always game for unusual meats. Horse as sushi? Sure, why not!

Casey Baseel of Rocket News 24 informs us that we may associate sushi with raw fish, but the term actually refers to rice mixed with vinegar. The meat involved can be anything, include horse. Baseel heard that a sushi restaurant in Tokyo called Nikuzushi offers horse sushi, so he visited to try it out. He says that it's pretty good:

Each cut had its own unique charms, whether the chewy nakaochi, firm akami, subtle char of the seared harami, or flavorful kick of the negi toro. What they all shared, though, was an exquisite deliciousness, accented by the meat juices mixing with the warm vinegared rice.

-via Foodiggity

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the movie Ghostbusters (and the Blu-ray release), Krispy Kreme will feature two new Ghostbusters doughnuts from September 29 through Halloween. The Ghostbuster and the Stay Puft are both marshmallow-filled doughnuts with Ghostbusters icing decoration.

You can pre-order if you need five dozen or more of them. I hope that’s for sharing at work or at a party. If you really need five dozen marshmallow-filled doughnuts for yourself, shame on you. -via Daily of the Day

Pop Tarts were introduced to the public 50 years ago. Really. I have a slightly embarrassing confession: I remember that. There was a rivalry between Kellogg’s Pop Tarts and Toast'em Pop Ups, but I found out from Uproxx that neither of these were the first fruit-filled toaster pastry introduced in 1964. Back then, they had no frosting, and no one considered eating them cold. Pop Tarts have an interesting history on their way to being the snack food that everyone makes fun of, but eats anyway. There’s not much fruit in them, and no one considers them health food, but we eat them anyway. We argue about whether to toast them or not, and we argue about which flavors are the best, but we eat them anyway.

The post at Uproxx is titled as a ranking of the best Pop Tart flavors, which no one will totally agree with. Blueberry is best (I’m eating a blueberry store brand toaster pastry as I type this), then cherry, then the rest are awful. But there’s a lot more to learn about Pop Tarts along with the ranking. What’s your favorite Pop Tart flavor? 

(Image credit: Allegrorondo)

We’ve posted an awful lot of restaurant dishes that are super expensive in order to generate publicity, and their price is justified by ingredients such as edible gold leaf and the jewel-encrusted souvenir dish they are served in. This is different. The list at Cracked contains dinner orders that come with theatrics or gimmicks, such as the Octopop.

The terrifyingly named octopop was conceived by Australian chef Adam Melonas at Dubai's Burj al-Arab hotel, presumably after he read the Necronomicon and mistook it for a confectionery handbook. Its basic idea is actually pretty simple: It's a piece of roast octopus on a stick.

However, in true mad scientist fashion, Melonas has added to the process until the end result barely resembles octopus or, for that matter, food. The waxy sheen and structure of the octopop are achieved by vacuum-cooking the octopus for 12 hours, then using a knife and an enzyme called transglutaminase (a substance commonly used to glue bits of meat together) to turn the perished cephalopod into a pretty, flower-like construct. The end result is dipped in spiced gel and stuck on a stick with some dill for you to try and figure out what the hell you're chewing on.

That’s just one of six really weird foods or food presentations that will set you back big bucks, described in the not-for-broadcast language of Cracked. -via Metafilter

(Pikachu by Charaben Mania)

(Chickens by akinoichigo)

Which came first--the Pikachicken or the egg? We may never know, but we can be sure that these eggs are as cute as they are delicious. Rocket News 24 rounded up 16 adorably crafted hard boiled eggs made in Japan. They include cows, bunnies, pandas, and strawberries.

With the recent hipster obsession with Starbuck’s Pumpkin Spice Latte, and the other foods that jumped on the pumpkin spice bandwagon, it only makes sense that we eventually have a pumpkin spice hamburger. And here it is. As a play on the latte, Pornburger calls their creation the Pumpkin Spice Fatte. But this one goes the latte one better: it actually contains a bit of pumpkin! And coffee, too! If the list of ingredients is too small on the picture, see it full-size at Pornburger.

You might love it, but I’m an old fart a purist. The cinnamon, ginger, and clove combination (with occasional allspice, nutmeg, and mace) is what makes pumpkin pie special. Or at least edible. If we put it in everything, we may as well just forget the pumpkin.  -via Time

In the realm of British insults, calling someone a "chocolate teapot" is equivalent to telling them they're useless. Yet with the advent of the U.K. Nestle Product Technology Centre's victory in creating a chocolate teapot that can withstand several minutes of hot tea brewing, the phrase may not be such an insult after all. A group of scientists and engineers got together to make this crucial milestone in chocolate technology.

The design ingredients necessitated dark chocolate with 65 percent chocolate solids, which created a base that wouldn't melt quickly. Molding the base ingredients into a teapot with thick walls gave the end result more delicious stamina. The final product melts just enough per brew to give your cup of tea a light chocolate flavoring. I have a coconut tea that would work nicely. Bring it on!

Read more about the chocolate teapot and see a video of its construction here.