Holy Crumpet!

Crumpets: At the Leaky Cauldron in the third book, Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge offers Harry tea and crumpets rather than expelling him .  These are rather simple to make, with few ingredients: flour, sugar, salt, yeast, butter, and milk.

The Dry Ingredients

Mixing in the Milk and Butter

 Waiting for the Yeast to Rise

 And Waiting...

We ended up outside where it was much warmer, because the house was too cool for the batter to rise.

Our Pretty Cookie Cutter Shapes

No crumpet rings or lobster rings so we used regular cookie cutters - they work just fine so long as they're not plastic (note, we did not try that, we used our common sense). And what is a lobster ring?? Google image results? Not helpful.

Filling in the Cookie Cutters

Our First Attempt

Flipping the crumpets over is like flipping pancakes over.

Holy Crumpet It's a Face!

A kinda scary one at that...

Making More...

Well That Wasn't Supposed To Happen

Spoon submerged in the batter. Very messy.

Moose!

KCE Star

The KCE Star was just recently discovered, didn't you know?

Final Product (Two Batches Worth)

After broken lids, banged heads, lots of mess, and improvisation, the crumpets were a success! Add some jam and/or butter for the full flavor. The recipe says to toast before each serving, but it tastes just as good without.

Golden Victoria Sponge Sandwich Cake (from Ron)

The recipe we did this time was the Victoria Sponge Sandwich Cake which the author imagine Ron sent to Harry for his Birthday. We wonder if Ron made it himself? Though we doubt it. It was probably Molly. :)

Again, we swam that day too, so ignore the bathing suits. :)

The Ingredients

The First Step

Measuring the flour, sugar, and salt.

KCE working as a team!

Whisking!

We just really liked this pic because of how shiny the bowl is. :D

Mixing and Beating (seems like we might be talking about music now...)

Cracking an Egg

The Batter

This is how it looked right before we put it in the pan.

Oops!

C might've accidentally dropped the spatula. Good thing we were done using it!

Right before the oven.

Warning: Do not use wax paper in the oven! It will burn.

The recipe called for parchment paper and as we had none, we were going to substitue with wax paper. Good thing K's mom looked it up online first!

Tip: If you don't have parchment paper, cooking spray (Pam) works just fine!

Into the Oven

Probably should have used oven mitts or pot holders here, but no burns were gotten!

Clean Up

These are all the dishes we made in the process. Fortunately it was less than when we made the muffins.

Baking

The cookbook called for two round pans, to layer the cake later. However, we just put all the batter in one bigger pan and stacked pieces of cake ourselves.

Out of the Oven

So the cake may have looked slanted and been thicker on one side, but it still worked! And this recipe lived up to it's name as well. Up close it really did look like a songe!

Slicing

K cutting the first piece of cake!

Almost there!

The recipe called for raspberry jam, but as none of had any, we had to substitute with peach jam or cherry preserves, both of which were yummy! Though we are in agreement that the cherry was slightly better.

The Peach Jam!

The Final Product

The sponge cake with jam in the middle and on top!

Thirsty!

Gotta have milk with cake, right?

And though this has nothing to do with baking....

Abby!

K's cat with *very* glowy eyes!

Overall, the Victoria Sponge Sandwich Cake was a success! We had fun making it and it tasted delicious!

Sugary 1-2-3 Chocolate Peanut Butter Crunch Bonbons for Kids

Hello there. Ready for the most awesome treat ever? This recipe is the magical version of the popular Muggle candy Reeses but has a crunchy twist (rice cereal). The following whimsical treat appears when Harry visits Honeydukes in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

The Ingredients

Pictured is peanut butter, vanilla extract and powdered sugar. The recipe calls for rice cereal, so we used Rice Krispies of course. 

Mixing the peanut butter with sugar and vanilla extract.

This may not look tasty but it is. 

Dipping the delicious treats in CHOCOLATE (Yay!)

                                                               The Final Yummy Result

Tip #1  - the recipe calls to refrigerate for ten minutes but my sis and I both liked the treats when they were in the refrigerator longer. 

And as the cookbook warns, "These are called '1-2-3' because you'll be done before you finish counting to three. Also, they are so irresistible that they'll be gone in the same amount of time."

Scrumptious Oversized Blueberry Muffins

For our first recipe we chose something sweet! Oversized Blueberry Muffins with(out) Crunchy Tops. Mrs. Weasley gives Harry these muffins to eat the morning of his hearing in The Order of the Phoenix.

The easy part of making the batter: getting the ingredients, even zesting the lemon. The hard part: baking in swimsuits and towels! (Try keeping them up while whisking.)

Mixing all the ingredients......

Melting the butter.

We promise we didn't melt it like that, sticking over the edge. We did cut it in half first. An interesting tidbit, one of the authors of this blog (C of KCE) actually ate a whole half of a stick of butter for a cross country scavenger hunt. Gross! We must say, we were pretty impressed she made it that far.

Zesting the Lemon!

Apparently there is an actual too called a "zester". Well we didn't have one, so we used a cheese grater instead. Worked just as well :)

The Final Step

Tip! You probably don't need to use all the blueberries. There were a lot.

Ready for baking! And these were truly oversized, the batter went all the way to the top.

In Progress

Cookies? I thought we were bakng muffins....

Out of the Pan

Since they were so oversized and ran together this was how K managed to get them ot of the pan. Took two knivves to lift under the top, and we were a little worried about the tops coming off but it worked out! (But if anyone knows a better way...please tell us.)

All Done!

So these Oversized Blueberry Muffins were definitely a success! They tasted great. The recipe called for turbinado sugar to sprinkle on top, but we think a lemon frosting might be just perfect!