Harry Potter Themed Birthday Crafts

It is not everyday that your little sister turns twenty one. It was easy to think of a theme for the little miss because she is a Potter Head (that's what they call people who're Potter fanatics), but it was very difficult to single-handedly plan the crafts out and bring the Pottermania to life. Here's how the Aßßie did it ...

The cake was my first project and since I am no baker (recently debuted into baking with some Pillsbury cupcakes *sheepish grin*) I decided to get the rectangle base from Safeway (ding!). The red an black icing swirls were a special request I made to the cake lady. The Harry Potter Castle Cake Decorating Kit was such a fantastic attraction to my themed birthday party. It came with a mighty beautiful Hogwarts castle that comprised of three hard plastic walls and a soft plastic smaller wall that you can assemble in pieces. There were figurines of Harry, Hermione, and Ron. Together, the kit added to the pile of Potter gifts. To make Hogwarts more real, I edited and printed out some house crests of Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff and also a Hogwarts banner to go. They were taped to kebab skewers that I picked up from Walmart.

The Cauldron Cakes were my first baking tutorial with my sister, the baking genius behind Sara's Baked Creations. I used a Pillsbury Devil Food Cake (sugar-free) mix to bake the cupcakes and then scooped out a bit of the insides to fill them up with vanilla frosting. Next, I made green frosting! I had pretty awesome fun with using the green color to dye the vanilla frosting green, and then enjoyed making the swirls with a fine tip from a Wilton decorating kit (28 or 30 tips) that my sister got as an advanced birthday present.

I beheaded (sliced the tops off) the same Devil Food Cake cupcakes and dirty-iced the flat bottoms to create Hagrid's Dirty Cake minis. I made sure I spelled 'Happee' birthday in Hagrid style. The pumpkins in the background where a just-in-time harvest decoration and Hagrid's Hut was printed and taped to styrofoam that I had stocked up in my store from packing material. The tiny Hagrid you see with the barrel is actually a troll. He is a souvenir from our family vacation in Norway where trolls are mythical creatures said to inhabit the mountains!

I was super short of time to actually create a Quidditch pitch, I had plans of doing that on the cake but then the decorating kit happened. I had the Quidditch hoops ready with house flags and banners, and I printed out the sitting towers, the checkered ones, and added the Quidditch crests of the houses to them. But, I didn't know how to incorporate them into the party. That's when Mom simply pushed them into a block of styrofoam and there it was, the perfect Quidditch display. Let's zoom in on the eatable goodies.

The Nimbus Treats were a combination of pretzel sticks and a strip of cheese (cut from Kraft cheese singles) and stripe-cut to make the broom's frill. Guess what happened to the tops of the Devil Food Cake cupcakes that had been sliced off to make the Dirty Cake mini's? I decided to fuse two of the tops together and insert a toothpick to hold them together. During the baking process they had already split up to create the perfect dent that made them look like Bludgers! 

The Golden Snitches were White Lindt chocolates (they come in gold wraps) with wings made out of aluminum foil. I simply taped the two twisted parts of the Lindt truffle on either of its side and taped them to aluminum foil that I had hand-folded into wing shape.

Visit Abbies Adventure Diaries again for tutorials!