This is fair enough, as you can still find many of the famous sweets from Harry's magic world, you just have to do a little extra searching. Many of the recipes that have diverging names also have a passage from the book quoted. If you read through the short passage, you'll soon discover what sweets from the Harry Potter world correspond with the one in the recipe. Of course, not every sweet treat in Harry Potter was unique and magical. Muggle-like treats such as hot chocolate and fudge are also included in this book.
The size of the box for this kit really has to be addressed in any review for it. It's a fairly large box, slightly larger than a shoebox, and decorated with colorful stripes and diamond patterns. The whole thing makes you anticipate something special, as if there's going to be a whole magic candy shop inside. Ok, perhaps not, but the kid in me is not completely gone, and I do remember what these things would have felt like as a kid. Instead, you open the box and there's a small book, really only the size of a small postcard. Next to it are some bags for holding candy, and some plastic brooms for embedding into lollipops. The last bit of actual candy making supply is a small plastic candy mold tray with various shapes like frogs and owls.
So are the recipes any good? From what I can tell, yes. The ingredients are often simple and rich, it's just the technique that you have to get down. And Dinah Bucholz, the book's author, does warn you that you'll probably need to try these recipes a few times to get them right. Candy making is simple, but like any sort of cooking, it can fail in one step. This was definitely my experience with the Butter Beer recipe. The recipe calls for cooking a sugar mixture until it becomes a deep amber color. Well, I cooked it right into big chunks of rock crystals the first time I tried. I can probably give the author a pass on this, however, since I'm in a high-altitude, arid environment. On my next try, I constantly fed the mixture small amounts of water, and turned the heat way up. It took what seemed to be about 20 minutes, although the recipe didn't have a time measure to expect for this step anyway. Once that was out of the way, well, it was some darn good Butter Beer: just what I imagined when I first saw it in the movies. I could only ask for a recipe for a frothy whipped topping to emulate the appearance of beer, but I digress.
Another small problem with the recipe was that it told you how much carbonated water to use, but not how much syrup. You could kind of figure it out by the fact that the recipe is supposed to serve 4, but this suggestion comes at the end of the recipe. If you'd poured out all your syrup before you read that, well, you'd have a very sugary brew. And there seem to be a lot of little details like this that were skipped over or ordered in an inconvenient way. There's an ice cream recipe that asks you to add the ice cream mixture to "the canister" and freeze according to the manufacturer's instructions. Well, from reading other recipes, you might deduce that this means an ice cream maker canister. But if you looked at the recipe by itself and tried to go buy everything you needed, you might not figure out you're missing this piece of equipment until later. That is, if you figure out what's missing at all.
The box does say this kit is for ages 8 and up, but with all the little omissions that require experience and wisdom to fill in, it's not going to end up being the most kid-friendly ordeal. There's a lot of creative recipes in this book, and it does have that magical feel to it, especially with the Harry Potter passages. Even with the setbacks of the Butter Beer, I still want to make a Chocolate Love Potion, a glass of Pumpkin Juice, and some Chocolate Frogs. Then I think I want to have the best Harry Potter marathon ever.
