This year the girls wanted a Harry Potter or Wizard themed birthday party. (Read on to get the free takeaway - Harry Potter Cupcake Toppers)
I thought how do I get into the spirit of the Harry Potter theme?
The invitations are the way to set the scene. Making sure that the invites are on track with the Harry Potter/Wizard theme is a good start.
I create my own for the twins birthday parties and this year was no exception.
To make my invitation have the right look I had to have the Harry Potter Font or something like it. Font Space have free Harry Potter fonts and are easy to download, install and start using.
Instructions if you are installing a font for your very own Harry Potter invitation:- Download the font
- Install the font into the fonts folder in the control panel
- Once the font or fonts are now added to your fonts folder you should see them in Photoshop or other programs you use to create your invitation. (I used Photoshop but if you don't have Photoshop you can use a free web based Photoshop like editor called PIXLR EDITOR )
- Now you have your fonts you can get creative with your invitation.
Now you have created your Harry Potter/Wizard invitations, the food and decor are something to think about.
What type of things will you serve to make the kids feel like they are at a Harry Potter Party? The twins told me that if it is not 100% Harry Potter that is okay, it just has to be wizard like.
Phew I thought, I was worried that it might not be exact and of course not accurately Harry Potter.
I googled for inspiration. I also went to Pinterest too.
Below is what I created for the party. I did my best to keep with the Harry Potter or Wizard theme.
- I saw from Darla at Bakingdom that she did a coloured layered cake for each house in Harry Potter. After getting depressed about all the fancy cakes out there, I thought that this would be easier to do. I have done
one similar the year or so before but it was a cake that had sweets inside. ..yep a surprise for everyone. I used the layered cake idea for the Harry Potter Party but did my own decorations.
For the layers I added food colouring to four cakes to get one for each house:
Gryffindor - Red
Hufflepuff - Yellow
Ravenclaw - Blue
Slytherin - Greeen - My decorations for the cake were piped out of dark chocolate in the shape of Harry Potter's glasses and also the scar on his forehead. I also used chocolate stars that were already made in the cake section of the supermarket.
- Gryffindor - RedSorting Hat Cupcakes - I saw them online and had to give them a go. Make your cupcakes. Cut a bit out of the middle and put in a few coloured M&M's (I used the ones that didn't have peanuts in case of allergies). The colours need to match the houses in Harry Potter. I did have to stand for a while and separate the colours I needed from a big bag of M&M's. Once you have put the secret M&M's into the cupcake put the cake back on top and then ice it. Decorate and done. Now do it the rest of them and then all your sorting hat cupcakes are organised. I made sure that there was an even number of each colour.
Below are the colours I needed for the sorting hat cupcakes and as said got only those colours in six cupcakes each. I made chocolate vegan cupcakes with very dark chocolate icing. The icing was just icing sugar, organic cocoa powder from the health food shop and water. This icing is just like pure chocolate and perfect for anyone that cannot have butter or other ingredients.
Hufflepuff - Yellow
Ravenclaw - Blue
Slytherin - Greeen
- Wizard Bread - Fairy bread but these were stars and therefore more wizardry than normal fairy bread. I had fresh bread on the day of the party, and simply cut out star shapes with a cookie cutter. Once all done I put a little bit of butter on each star and decorated them with hundreds and thousands.
- Broomsticks - I got the idea from One Little Project and this can also be used for Halloween as well. All you need is straight pretzels, cheese sticks that are able to be created into the end of the broom (I used Bega Stringers as the cheese allows you to take the ends and turn them up to look like a straw broom), and then you need some chives to tie around the base of the cheese and pretzel to make it look like the tie holding the broom and the handle together. Making the broomsticks is rather fiddly so if you are like me there might be a few words said when they don't go your way. You need to be extra careful when you push in the pretzel into the cheese.One tip that helps is to make a hole in the cheese to allow the pretzel to go in easily, however be careful as it might make the cheese break too.
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Magic Wizard Chocolate - I saw this online ages ago and have used it for a few parties now. I have made it different by some things I used in the chocolate and of course naming it magic wizard chocolate helped make it more special for the party.
To create the magic wizard chocolate. Firstly purchase some dark chocolate or the chocolate of choice to melt. You will need a couple of packs as you need to melt the chocolate and lay it on a big tray. If you have a lot of chocolate you can make two trays. You will be amazed at how quickly this gets eaten.I chose dark cooking chocolate and got three packs of the chocolate.You then need to have sweets to stick into the melted chocolate before it hardens.Feel free to add whatever you wish as it is up to you and the theme of your party. I chose eyes, bright candy, Kit-Kats, raspberries and sprinkles.Once the chocolate has set (I helped it along by putting it in the fridge). All you need to do is to break it into little pieces so that the kids can just take a bite sized part and not a whole bit of it.The eyes help it look a bit spooky so will be a perfect party treat for Halloween, monster and of course a wizard party like Harry Potter. - Lolly Snakes - I made sure to have snakes as one house is called Slytherin and a birthday party really has to have more sweets it seemed to make sense.
- Magic Chocolate Frogs - In Harry Potter there are chocolate frogs that fly away. Mine were not like this and nearly all the frogs got eaten to never return on the day. Sad but they were very yummy.
I made sure that all food had labels that fit in with the theme of the party. This way everyone got involved in the fun.
There was also a seat that had invisible cloaks for anyone that needed one. Yep I wore mine although no one knew due to it being in invisible.
Some great tips and more inspiration to throw an amazing Harry Potter Party is listed in the BuzzFeed's article on 33 cheap ways to organise an epic Harry Potter Halloween Party
I hope this gives you some great ideas for a Harry Potter Party or even Halloween.
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