How to: Harry Potter marathon

Thinking about doing a Harry Potter Marathon? We recently did one and granted we went a little overboard. If you need ideas and tips this is the right blogpost for you. We have food ideas and lots of decoration ideas for you. 

FOOD:

Golden Snitches

This might be the easiest thing to do but it looks super cool. First up you're going to buy some Ferrero rocher and then you will download this template for the wings. Print it as many times as you need to and cut it out. I found that gluing it with a hot glue gun to the chocolates worked best. And that's already it. Super quick and easy. Btw if you got some round fairy lights laying around you can also easily attach the snitch wings to them and it will look super fun. 

Nimbus 2000 

Also very easily done is the nimbus 2000 snack. You just need to buy some Reeses, preferably the small ones, and salt sticks. Then you take the Reeses out of the little form and put a salt stick in it.

Sorting hat cupcakes

If you have done any research on pinterest, you probably have stumbled over these cupcakes. The concept is simple: bake as many cupcakes as you want and color the inside according to the four Hogwarts houses. Everyone can now pick and eat a cupcake and find out in which house they truly belong. 

You could basically use just any recipe you like, but I used this one:

1. Mix together 150g of butter and 150g of brown sugar until it is light and fluffy. 

2. Add a teaspoon of vanilla extract before you add 3 eggs and whip again.

3. Add in 145g of flour and a teaspoon of baking powder. 

4. Fill the mixture into a tray of 12 lined cupcake cases and bake it at 180 degrees C for 25 minutes.

For the frosting whip up 100g of sugar and carefully add in 200g of icing sugar (it dusts up quite a lot) then add a teaspoon of vanilla extract and two heaped spoons of biscoff lotus spread. Mix it together well. If the frosting is too thick, add in a little splash of milk. 

Take out four tablespoons of frosting and then add one tablespoon into each of the four little bowls. Mix a bit of food coloring into each of the bowls (red, blue, green and yellow)

When the cupcakes have cooled down completely take a knife and cut out a little bit from the middle. Progress by adding one of the four colored frostings into each hole. Put the cut out part back in. Last but not least put the non colored frosting over the top to mask the color.

You can also mold little sorting hats out of fondant or marzipan to make the cupcakes a bit more appealing.

Here are a few other foods that we had and labeled suiting to the Harry Potter theme:

• "Huffle Puffs": they are peanut flips, but since they look really puffy it matches perfectly to the house name "Hufflepuff":)
• "Professor Sprouts Vegetable garden": veggie sticks with a delicious dip or like in our case dips. You can do any dip you like, we did one with fresh herbs and one with hard boiled eggs and little pickles.
• "Slytherin snakes": put gummy snakes into a bowl and you're done!
• "Pizza sorting hats": cut pizza dough into triangles, roll over one side about an inch and put your toppings on to the other part of the dough. Then bake according to instruction of the dough.
• "Butterbeer": Of course we had to do the famous butterbeer. For us, considering all the food we had, it almost was a little bit too much and we only drank a bit of it for breakfast the next day. You can find tons of recipes on pinterest.
• "Muggle Water": take your favorite beverage, in our case ice tea, and label it as muggle water. 
  
  
  

Need some more ideas? For the next time we would try these foods:

• Gryffindor grapes
• Deviled Dragons eggs (you can die the yellow of the egg green for a special effect)
• Harry Potters Birthday cake (in hindsight we would've loved this idea, so for the next marathon, we will definitely do this)
• Popcorn that is died green, could also be labeled as troll boogers.
• Pumpkin pasties
• Bertie Botts every flavored beans, I don't think you can do them yourselves, but you can buy them in lots of stores.

DECOR:

First up we can recommend checking Pinterest for free printable downloads. We had fun prints like the one saying "the third-floor corridor on the right-hand side is out of bounds to everyone who does not wish to die a very painful death"  or a sign for the toilet with the joke "ministry of magic this way". We also found our train tickets on there. 

As you already know we also did put a little card in front of every food labeling it with a fun name. For instance guacamole were troll boogers and mikado chocolates became magic wands. (You could also easily do the magic wands with salt sticks). We created the labels ourselves but you can also find a lot of them on Pinterest. If however you decide to do them by yourself I would recommend downloading the Harry Potter font. It just looks so much more fun if your using the font. I'll link it here.

Floating candles

For our floating candles I used cardboard that I glued together so that it formed a "longish" tube. After that I let some hot glue drip over the edges and let it dry properly. Next up I just painted it white and put an electric candle inside it, attached a see trough string and done.

A thousand letters

We all know the iconic scene where about a thousand letters fly into Harry Potters house. Recreating this scene is actually pretty simple. I bought some white envelopes and red candles, which I used to create a seal on the letters. Again, attached a see through string and hung it up. You could even notch it up a step and write his address onto the letters. 

Follow the spiders 

Another simple decor option is to buy some plastic spiders and hang them up in a line just like in the movie where they had to follow the spiders.

Have you seen this wizard? 

A very fun photo opportunity would be to create the wanted Azkaban prisoner sign. For that you'll need a big cardboard and black and white paint. Cut out the shape and color it. We didn't use the prisoner number sign but only the big "have you seen this wizard?" sign so therefore I would recommend to just do that one.

The chamber of secret has been opened enemies of the heir beware!

Got an old red lipstick? Then go ahead and write that on your mirror, spray some glass cleaner over it to make it look a bit smudged and drippy and you're done. 

Hogwarts letter 

As the invite I recreated the Hogwarts letter. I basically wrote down exactly what is written on the original letter but changed the name to the ones invited and added the date of the Harry Potter marathon.  I wrote it down on some shiny paper that I bought at the store and then I just burned the edges to make it look a bit more "old". I also again created a seal with the red candles although with the shiny paper it didn't work too good. 

9 3/4

To make the entry a bit more fun I created the entrance to the 9 3/4 platform. I used a brown paper in the length of my door and red paint to create tiles. I recommend using a normal kitchen sponge and dipping it into the paint. Like that you will get a pretty realistic tile pattern and it is much easier then painting all the tiles by hand. 

Daily prophet

We were lucky enough to borrow the daily prophet from our neighbors just like an exact replica of the sorting hat but I am sure you could also print it yourself with some downloads from Pinterest. 

And that is about it! Add wands and costumes if you're feeling extra fancy and enjoy your movie marathon.