Adventures in Harry Potter baking

This post contains Amazon affiliate links.

My Mum knows that I like to keep busy with the children over the school holidays, as well as enjoying a challenge, and so this summer she treated us to a copy of The Official Harry Potter Baking Book. This book contains 40+ recipes inspired by the Harry Potter books and films, alongside lots of photos and trivia.

It's a lovely book to browse through, with plenty of pictures of the gorgeous (and slightly intimidating) bakes which are all beautifully styled. I sat the children down with a pack of post it notes so that they could pick out the ones that they wanted to try, then I went through afterwards and weeded out the ones that I thought we could manage to make a start with. Some of them are very complicated!

I decided that we would start with the Wizard's Chess Squares, which are plain and chocolate flapjack squares arranged to look like a chessboard. I've made flapjacks lots of times before and already had most of the ingredients so I was feeling confident.

We were very pleased with our finished display! I'd not made chocolate flapjacks before and this recipe was absolutely delicious. If you know your chess, you may notice that there should be an extra row to the chessboard. Unfortunately the finished bake went a bit crumbly so we didn't have quite enough squares to make a full board...it still tasted good when eaten with a spoon though!

Next we tried another simple recipe - Wand Breadsticks. These were very easy to make and didn't need many ingredients. The children had fun making different shapes and styles, and they tasted good too.

Our most recent bake was these doughnuts. The Harry Potter connection? Imagine them piled up with sweets and chocolate frogs to produce a Honeydukes Haul Cake. I'd never made doughnuts before and I was very pleased with the result - they were delicious! And not nearly as difficult as I had imagined they would be. This is definitely a recipe that I'll be returning to!

We still have plenty of things left to keep us busy baking. I'm even wondering whether to change things up this Christmas and attempt a Hogwarts Gingerbread Castle using the templates provided in the book!