Wednesday, August 7, 2013

The Book Cookbook: Harry Potter and ALL THE FOODS!


If you follow my instagram and twitter you probably would have been inundated with my drunken and slightly blurry photos documenting my (*ahem* very successful *ahem*) Harry Potter party. Somehow I have never thrown or been to a Harry Potter party before, which is CRAZY because I love HP and costume parties, so that makes this party all the more special. Also making it more special is the 6-month long HP readalong all the cool kids took part in this year. I kept cracking jokes about plumbing and wand/wangs and realised no one understood what I was going on about and that made me so sad and I wish you'd all been able to apparate into my house and we could have hung out and argued about Sirius and the Marauders and had way too many butterbeer jelly-shots.

Me at one point in the night thinking about you guys
But I did my best to have an awesome night and that wasn't really so hard because I have great friends who are ridiculously wonderful costume-thinker-uppers and I don't think anyone came in a typical school uniform and bathrobe costume (actually, my sister and Chris did, but shhhh). We had Trevor the toad and Errol the Owl, Luna Lovegood, Dobby, a pimpin' Lucius, and the sorting hat (which looked unfortunately like a KKK costume) and a bunch of others, most of which are documented on my instagram for posterity. And then there was Tom and I, the party throwers, dressed up as post-book 7 Frorge and Sirius Black's wanted poster. I think it's things like this that prove we're made for each other.


So we had Wrock* playing, played through the first 3 films and reenacted scenes, playing Quidditch pong and drank A LOT. And, of course, we ate a lot too. It wouldn't be Harry Potter without some tasty tasty food. And this is where it turns from a "look how much fun I had!" post into the second edition of The Book Cookbook, because I'm going to share 3 recipes that featured at this party.

“Yeah, well, food's one of the five exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfigurations," said Ron, to general astonishment.”
Anytime we have a themed party (which has only recently become a thing) we try to make our food fit into the theme, so when we had our medieval party we had mead, mulled wine, salt bread and turkey legs. In this case we decided to go the finger-food route and covered a table with sherbet lemons, pixie sticks, acid pops (just sour chuppa-chups) polyjuice potion** bottles of honey mead plus snitch cupcakes, butterbeer jelly-shots and pumpkin pasties. All were amazingly delicious, and while not exactly the food from the books they all fit into the magical HP world of tasty stuffs and are 100% necessary for any future HP parties you're planning.


Snitch Cupcakes

“The long game was ended, the Snitch had been caught, it was time to leave the air...”
My sister Rosie is a mad cupcake decorator, so clearly when I found the recipe/design for Snitch cupcakes on Mugglenet I sent it her way. And she did an amaaaazing job! The cupcake part is pretty much up to you, the original recipe just called for a box-cake, but you could make them from scratch in any flavour you like. The decorating is equally easy, basically you need two shades of yellow (or gold) icing (Rosie went buttercream, but the flavour/type is up to you) and some melted white chocolate. All the directions are laid out step by step on the Mugglenet recipe page, so get on it guys!





This picture is from Taste.com.au
Pumpkin Pasties
"'Hungry, are you?'
'Starving,' said Harry, taking a large bite out of a pumpkin pasty."
We were already pretty drunk when my friend Rocco finally showed up after playing chauffeur to his girlfriend and some of her friends, and his arrival was all the more sweet because he came carrying a container full of homemade pumpkin pasties made fresh by his girlfriend. I'm not a huge fan of pumpkin usually, but these are so good. They're made with pumpkin, walnut and feta (and some other tasty additions) and they were the perfect pick-me-up for a group of drunken Harry Potter characters. They're also decidedly non-themey food, so there's no reason not to make them for dinner or lunch or a non-HP party you're throwing. The recipe (because I know you're all desperate for it) can be found here.


Butterbeer Jelly-shots
"Harry drank deeply. It was the most delicious thing he'd ever tasted and seemed to heat ever bit of him from the inside."
So clearly I had to make butterbeer because it's not a wizarding party without it, but I decided to make jelly-shots because the drink recipes I found seemed so sweet that I couldn't imagine anyone actually drinking more than half a cup. Plus making jelly-shots always feels vaguely science-y, so i got to pretend I was in a potions class when I whipped them up the night before (you know I used my wand). I got the recipe from here but tweaked it slightly, instead of cream soda (which we don't get here in Australia) I used root beer since I figured that might dilute the sweetness a little, and instead of vanilla vodka I just used vodka I already had mixed with about half a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Also, if you're vegan/vegetarian and don't want to use gelatin you could absolutely use something like agar agar instead. And helpful hint, since it's butterbeer flavoured and you're probably going to be making this for a HP party, try and find some of those silicone ice trays in appropriate HP shapes (I'm thinking lightening bolts would be awesome) because that'll make them more fun and awesome than just regular rectangles.  IMPORTANT: These taste amazing but holy crap you don't notice they're alcoholic at all, so be careful how many you shove in your mouth - I got us all very, very drunk very, very quickly.
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So get your Ron on and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat!

He knows what's what


*Wizard Rock, there are some crazy good playlists on YouTube

**Luke tried to infuse vodka with Jelly Belly jellybeans and basically the colours all ran and turned into a murky red-brown gloop. It looked foul, but tasted pretty amazing.

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