Kelly the Culinarian: Epic Harry Potter Party: What We Ate for Katie's 21st Birthday Bash

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Epic Harry Potter Party: What We Ate for Katie's 21st Birthday Bash

Last night, we all got together to celebrate Katie's 21st birthday. It was as awesome as Katie is!

Planning this party reminded me how lucky I am to have the sisters that I do. They're amazing ladies whom I'm lucky enough to be related to. I wish I got to see them more often. They're busy changing the world and all, so it's tough to coordinate schedules. This weekend, we all set aside the time to mark our baby sister's arrival into adulthood. Welcome, we've been waiting!

Since she's really into Harry Potter (with being an internationally ranked quidditch star and all), we had food, drinks, decoration and even a playlist that was all Harry Potter and magic themed.

So let's back this up. For me, the party began a week ago when I ran my menu past Kelly, who's actually read all the Harry Potter books. Despite my love of quidditch, I have not read any of the books, so I relied on Kelly to ensure I had an authentic menu. Friday night, I started the baking extravaganza.

It was a messy, delicious process. Yesterday morning, I found this wonderful template for food labels and printed it out of my home computer.
I packed up all the glassware, treats and accouterments (this party took a lot of stuff).
Then headed over to my sister, Amanda's, apartment in the city. She has the perfect location for a shin dig and decorated appropriately.


We went out to dinner, then the treats and celebrating began!  The Harry Potter Party treat table:
I made all the edibles, which included:
Ollivanders Original Wands: I made chocolate dipped magic wands using pretzel rods, white chocolate and semi-sweet chocolate.  First, I melted a bag of white chocolate chips in a small dish in the microwave in 30-second bursts, then dipped each rod and placed them on a sheet of parchment paper to set. After the white chocolate set, I drizzled the melted semi-sweet chocolate over the rods. 

Butterbeer glazed cookies: I made a basic sugar cookie and added butterscotch chips to the batter. I rolled them out and cut them into circles, then baked them at 350 degrees for 13 minutes. Once they cooled, I spoon a butterscotch glazed over the top. This was a messy process, but the end result was delicious amazingness. Here's the recipe:
Butterbeer glaze recipe
2/3 cups butterscotch chips (ALDI makes some)
1/8 cup evaporated milk
1 Tablespoon corn syrup
Pinch of kosher salt
I doubled the recipe, mixed the ingredients together and microwaved it in 30-second intervals, stirring until smooth. I would eat dog hair covered in this stuff, it was that tasty.

Cauldron Cakes: These are a rebranding of my devilish oreo brownie bites recipe that I last made for Mandy's graduation (made, that seems like a long time ago). These were a decadent chocolate brownie stuffed with two oreos with peanut butter layers in between and chocolate icing on top.  Too decadent for words, right? I was told peanut butter icing would have been a better choice, but it wouldn't have gone along with the cauldron theme.  I would suggest baking these in silicone cups because the end result tends to stick to paper cups. 

Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans: These are just jelly beans.  We only had like 15 people, so I didn't want to go too crazy with the baking.  Especially because we had drinks to consume!

Mandy led the charge on the drinks front, and she did an awesome job. First up was the homemade alcoholic butterbeer. There are tons of recipes for butterbeer out there, but Mandy went with 1 cup of root beer, 1 shot of butterscotch schnapps and 1 scoop of vanilla ice cream. It was an adult root beer float that shall now be part of my bar repertoire. Mandy served these in Irish coffee mugs and in a cauldron, naturally.
She also made themed drinks for every house in Harry Potter. There were also drinks called Pensive Potion and something else made with sour gummy worms. We are classy drinkers.
Hufflepuff tasted the best. If you're familiar with the Harry Potter books, apparently "This Hufflepuff tastes like pansies" means something hilarious. The joke was lost on me.

There were also flaming shots, which are of course, best served after throwing cinnamon on the flame and yelling "Expecto petronum!"
We enjoyed our beverages.
 
And the company.

And ensured Katie had a great birthday. Here's to you, Katie! I hope 21 is a magical year for you.

1 comment:

Katie said...

I wish we had a photo of the expelliarmus shots!