Actually there is a splendid generic way of accessing remote resources as if they were local.

ssh -L 8080:localhost:80 username@EC2machine

this will tunnel the port 80 (the http protocol) , on your EC2 instance to your own computers loopback interface on the port 8080

Simply typing http://localhost:8080 on your computers web browser will redirect the request to your EC2 instance through the created SSH tunnel

the reason i choose 8080 instead of 80 for the loopback interface port, is that ports below 1024 are privileged and require sudo to be used.