Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!

These are the words with which Albus Dumbledore kicks off the welcome feast in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

The boy loves Harry Potter a lot. He started reading the books late last year and has just started the last one in the series. His food was even further limited recently due to some medication he needed to take and it really upset him. When you have a narrow diet to begin with, taking away all his favourite things was very traumatic, even if it was only for a few weeks. So he was talking about when he could eat properly again and how he wanted some Harry Potter food. Our little talk about a couple of meals got completely out of hand and ended up with us inviting some friends over for a Hogwarts Feast. To be honest it was like a party and you could use these ideas to create your own failsafe Harry Potter party. I threw this together in six days, so with a little bit more time something far grander could be created.

The living room was decorated along the lines of the Hogwarts Great Hall. The boy made candles by cutting a sheet of white cardboard into long rectangles and sticky taping a piece of cellophane to the top. I strung fishing line around the room and stuck the candles to it. The rest of the decorations were wizard portraits (found via google) printed and stuck to the walls, and Hogwarts and House crests printed and hung on odd bits of black fabric I had. We had a trestle table for the kids table and the teachers (grown ups) got to sit at our normal kitchen table.

A Hogwarts style feast is incredibly easy to do failsafe. It is all English style food; the first feast in the first book describes roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes and chips, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy and ketchup. Obviously not all of that is failsafe, but a large part of it is. My son got to choose what he wanted and that was lamb chops, sausages, baked potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, brussel sprouts, cabbage, beans and bread. The visiting kids mostly ate sausage sandwiches and Yorkshire pudding, but he helped himself to extra vegies. All of this was washed down with bottles of "butter beer".

Serving themselves from big platters was fun.

The grown ups got bonus pumpkin and mulled wine

Dessert was going to involve more choices and be more feast-like, but I ran out of time, so there was just ice cream sundaes from "Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour". I used Kersten's rice milk ice cream recipe as the general base for five different flavours. We had vanilla, carob fudge, caramel, pear and vanilla and banana (moderate amines), with mini marshmallows and natural sprinkles on top. There were plans to make some sort of caramel sauce to go on top, but again, time dictated otherwise.

No visit to Hogwarts would be complete without a trip to "Honeydukes" sweet shop. This is where failsafe went slightly out the window. We had "Bertie Bott's Every Flavoured Beans" (natural jelly beans), Sherbet Lemons (also natural ones from the supermarket), Sugar Quills (homemade), Acid Pops and drops and Pear pops and drops (homemade), Werewolf Fangs (milk bottles), Vanilla and Carob Fudge (Carob made to Kersten's recipe, vanilla was experimental I'll make it another time before I post a recipe for it) and Cauldron cakes (homemade carob muffins with natural green tinged icing, a natural snake and a pipe cleaner handle).

The big Honeydukes logo came from here

Dumbledore has a dish of these on his desk	Another Dumbledore favourite
The labels for the bags were printed from here	Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans-A risk with every mouthful
Cauldron Cakes	Snakes are optional extras

My son absolutely loves the Butter Beer. It is sweet and buttery, has an amazing head and looks like a cross between beer and coke.

Butter Beer
Ingredients

• 60g nuttelex
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 80ml rice milk
• dash vanilla essence

Method

1. Place nuttelex and sugar into a saucepan and cook over a low heat until melted and combined.
2. Add rice milk and increase temperature. Boil for about a minute.
3. Store in the fridge until you need it.
4. Before serving heat gently in the microwave as the nuttelex sets.
5. Dilute to taste with soda water. This made five serves for the kids - about half a beer bottle each.

We served it in clean, empty beer bottles that had new labels put on them. There are loads of different labels to choose from when you google it. I printed them and used double sided tape to stick them to the bottle.











 Sugar Quills

The sugar quills were made with my standard lollipop recipe  with vanilla flavour. I added a white food colouring to them, but this is not really necessary. The major difference is in the method. These need to be pulled. You will need to have the oven on at about 80˚C to keep the pieces you aren't working with soft.




Method

1. Once your candy is cool enough to pick up (with protective gloves) stretch and fold it over repeatedly until it is opaque and glossy.
2. Using scissors cut a portion of soft candy (I made five large quills to a batch of candy), put the rest in the oven. 
3. Cut another small piece from what you have and gently shape it into a longish stick. Lay it down.
4. Shape your other piece into a flat oval and lay it lengthways onto the other piece. This will be you feather.
5. Using scissors snip the edge of the feather in towards the spine on an angle to make it feathery.
6. All of this needs to be done very quickly before the candy hardens.
7. Cut a portion from what is in the oven and repeat until all candy is used.
8. Wrap in cellophane.

There are so many ideas online for Harry Potter parties and you are really only limited by how much time and effort you want to put in.

A Celebration!

My birthday boy

Hi! This is my new blog and I thought "what better way to start it than with a party?" I have so much to share that I will have to split this into a few posts.

So, birthday parties tend to be the bane of the failsafer. Bland, colourless food that no one else, let alone the failsafe kid himself, wants to eat. WRONG!

This was the party to end all parties. Mostly as I had told my son he had had plenty of birthday parties and they are a lot of work. But it was his first birthday with big school friends and his first failsafe party, so I wanted it to be spectacular and to make sure he didn't feel like he had missed out at all.

We chose a circus/carnival theme as he had been to a circus late last year and was completely in awe of it. It worked rather well as the decorations could be really colourful and make up for the less than colourful food.

The boy is currently gluten and dairy free as well as failsafe which makes it kind of tricky, compounded by his demand that he was to be able to eat ALL of the food at the party. This led to me making a few small allowances for the day. One was natural lollies of which I allowed him four, the other was milky bars and Werthers Originals in the piñata of which he was allowed one of each. The last allowance was a little bit of natural colours.

Planning makes a great party and I have to say that I am a fairly disorganised person. Lots of ideas floating around, but I have a tendency to leave things to the last minute. This was to be no exception. I got some stuff done in advance, but the week of the party was a little chaotic.

The food was simple fair/party food with a big emphasis on sugar and I enlisted the help of family on the day to pull it off.

There was Fairy floss, Donuts, chips, lollies, sherbet, chicken and chips and cakes and water and 'lemon'ade to drink.

The lollies - if you don't think you have the time or the ability there are a great selection of failsafe lollies available from www.allergytrain.com.au We had musk sticks, marshmallows, pear drops and pear lollipops (which I didn't end up using as the piñata was too full), plus I made some beautiful lollipops, drops and sherbet myself to go with them and we had some natural jelly beans and party mix.

Vanilla lollipops

drops

a selection

The basic candy recipe is

1 cup of sugar
1/2 cup of glucose syrup*
1/4 cup of water

Stir over medium heat until sugar dissolves and then boil over high heat without stirring until it reaches 140˚C on a sugar thermometer (soft crack). Remove from heat. This is the point where you would add any flavour or colour. In the case of the pink vanilla ones I added about 5 drops of cochineal and half a teaspoon of vanilla essence. Stir it in quickly and then spoon into moulds or blob on a tray lined with baking paper and insert stick.

I bought a hard candy mould that I used, but I only had one, so with the rest I made blobs and then I thought I would try my hand at taffy pulling. It's not difficult, but it is fiddly and a bit hot on the fingers. I have since read the suggestion of putting band-aids on your finger tips under gloves. All you need to do is put a reasonable sized glob on a baking tray or similar and let it cool until the outside has started to set. Pick it up and start to stretch it, then fold it over and give it a bit of a twist then do it all again. It goes opaque and pearlescent. Before it sets too hard stretch it out one last time to a semi-uniform thickness (depends on how big you want your lollipops, mine were less than a centimetre thick) then start to roll it up, twisting as you go. Once it is the size you want (mine were approximately 4cm across) cut it with some scissors and poke a stick into it before it goes completely hard.

If it starts to get too cool to twist, just cut it into small pieces and you have lovely little lollies. Put them into the fridge for a little while to help them set and to stop them from starting to dissolve in the humidity. Then wrap them in some cellophane or some bags and tie them tightly. I got little cellophane bags from a local packaging shop which made it far easier than wrapping (which is what I did at christmas). Store them in a sealed container in the fridge until you need them.

I made three other variants on the lollipops - 'lemon', pear and maple syrup.

Lemon was made by adding 1/2 tsp of citric acid and a few drops of natural yellow colour at the end. That colour is actually quite strong and a few drops make it quite bright.

Pear was made by substituting strained syrup from canned pears for the water. It was a subtle flavour, but nice. I also added some natural green colour. This was mostly so I could differentiate between them, but I wouldn't bother doing this again as the green is a very weak colour and it took a lot more to make even a very pale colour.

Maple syrup was made by using 1/4 cup of pure maple syrup and halving the amount of water. This seems to completely change the way the toffee works and I wouldn't recommend trying to pull it as it sets way too quickly.

Set them out in nice jars or glasses with a colourful label and voila! Party lollies!

Even the grown ups liked the lollipops.

 
The kids loved it and the adults got into it too. An absolute winner. Any that didn't fit on the table were put into the piñata and any others were kept in the fridge as treats for other days (I really made a lot).

I'll write more on the party in my next post.

Trish :D

*Edited 17-2-12 - I have been making a bit of candy lately and was not so happy with using that much glucose syrup, mostly from a cost perspective, partly from a health perspective, although a lollipop is never going to be healthy. I have been using half the quantity listed with very good results, so use 1/4 cup instead.
Next step is to experiment without it at all.