Trying Recipes from Harry Potter: Cauldron Cakes

Of course I had to make Harry Potter Cauldron Cakes!

And of course, this series of Harry Potter inspired food had to include 7 magical recipes, because we all know 7 is THE magical number.

He had never had any money for candy with the Dursleys, and now that he had pockets rattling with gold and silver he was ready to buy as many Mars Bars as he could carry – but the woman didn’t have Mars Bars. What she did have were Bettie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum, Chocolate Frogs, Pumpkin Pasties, Cauldron Cakes, Liquorice Wands and a number of other strange things Harry had never seen in his life. – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 6

Picture from the Harry Potter Wiki, found in Pottermore (CoS, CH8)

Did you ever wonder how the real cauldron cakes look like? They were never in the movies, so I always imagined them looking like a literal cauldron, extremely round and only possibly cooked with some magic… So I went to check the Harry Potter wiki and found this picture (on your left).

And, being honest, that image looks exactly like a chocolate cupcake with some green frosting. Not as magical as I thought, but still cute. Also, much easier to reproduce!

So let’s make some chocolate cup-cauldroncakes!

Ingredients:

Chocolate Cupcakes (for 12) 

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• ½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• ¼ teaspoon baking soda
• ⅛ teaspoon salt
• ¾ cups plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• ½ cup milk
• ¼ cup canola oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ¾ cups chocolate chips

Green Frosting (warning: this is super sweet!)

• 5 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup confectioners’ sugar
• 1/3 cup water
• 1/3 cup spinach (yes, spinach! Don’t worry, your frosting won’t taste like a green smoothie)

Instructions:

If you already have a favorite chocolate cupcake recipe, you can totally use it! I used my current favorite which I found here (thanks to my many hours checking Pinterest). Check out that blog post to read the complete recipe.

Also, if your current cupcake recipe doesn’t include chocolate chips, I strongly suggest you fix that 😉

After mixing all the ingredients for the cupcakes, I sprayed some oil to my cupcake pan and put it in the oven without the little molds/papers.

Then to make some experiments! So… I know that some people make their own food coloring at home and I really wanted to try it too! So I added spinach and water to my blender to get this super green spinach water. After that I removed the little spinach pieces with a strainer.

To make the frosting I just mixed butter with confectioners’ sugar and added about 2 or 3 tablespoons of the green spinach water. This will taste mostly like sugar, so don’t worry about the spinach flavor.

I had made butter/sugar frosting before and really liked it, but for some reason this time it turned out even sweeter than before! So if you’re not a fan of sugary frosting, I would recommend using your own white-frosting recipe and include the green water somewhere (maybe substitute half the liquids in your recipe with green water).

Also… I made a very important discovery here! Since the frosting was too sweet I decided to add a bit of extra butter, but I made the “mistake” of heating it in the microwave (something that recipe books and blogs discourage). But the result was great!

When you add warm butter to this mixture, the whole thing gets lumpy and doesn’t mix well… so that gave me an idea. I needed to make it warmer and get more lumps! Then it would look like a real, bubbling potion, haha.

My cupcakes came out looking really cute!

Here’s a lazy cook tip: Get a small tray like this one so it fits inside the toaster-oven! Sometimes I feel like turning the oven on is too much work. But the toaster-oven is so small and friendly and easy to use… I honestly cook 80% of my food there.

So, I took one of the beautiful cupcakes and carefully removed the top part with a knife. It doesn’t have to be a big cut, just enough to remove the round bit at the top.

And, why should we do that?

1. Because I think they look more like cauldrons when you remove that part.
2. Because I got to eat all the removed parts.

After removing the round-ish part of the cupcake, I turned it upside down. And it kinda looked like a cauldron!

Then it came my favorite step: Making a hole at the top! (Which means eating more discarded cupcake parts!)

I used a knife to kind of draw a circle on top of each cupcake, and the removed it by pinching it with my fingers.

And ta-da! A chocolate cauldron cake with bubbly green frosting. 

I’m still not sure if that green potion looks tasty or disgusting. But it does look cute!

The chocolate cupcake was really good and moist. I thought the frosting was too sweet, so I ended up scooping out half of it at the end. But I still enjoyed the flavor combination, just maybe in a smaller proportion next time.

Aaaah, I wish I still had some.

By the time I’m writing this, the cupcakes are long gone. But they will remain in my heart forever. Or until I have my next cupcake.

I’ve been having SO MUCH FUN making these Harry Potter recipes!

I promised I would make 7 of them, but I really would love to make more in the future!

What do you guys think? Let me know if you decide to make some cauldron cakes. I would love it if you tagged me on Instagram if you post them 😀

Other Wizarding World recipes:

• Hagrid’s Rock Cakes
• Niffler Bread
• Kreacher’s Onion Soup
• Pumpkin Pasties
• Treacle Tart
• Poor Muggle’s Butterbeer