Harry Potter Cake

For the last few months my oldest has been on quite the Harry Potter kick.

He has read the first 4 books and even dressed up as Harry Potter for Halloween.

So when the time came to talk about his birthday it was no surprise what he wanted for the cake.

Harry Potter.

(We also made cupcakes, but that will be another post).

I didn't have as much time as I wanted when I was decorating this cake, I probably would have paid a lot more attention to detail and smoothed out the frosting a little better, but my son was super happy with it, so that's all that matters!

I made the batter from scratch using my yellow cupcake recipe. (You can find that recipe here). 

I made the full recipe, plus half.

This allowed me to make 24 cupcakes and one 8-inch cake.

After the cake baked and cooled I frosted it with just plain white frosting from a container.

I put the cake in the fridge to let the frosting harden a little while I mixed up some colors.

I made a gold-ish yellow and a burgundy-ish color and scooped them into Ziploc bags.

Since the cake and frosting were slightly cold I smoothed out the white base a little bit.
I then started around the outside of the cake with the two colors to make a Gryffindor scarf.
Starting with the burgundy color I just drew rectangles and filled them in.
I didn't worry about it looking nice just yet, I just wanted to get the spacing on the cake.

I then filled between the burgundy with the gold color, making it look like stripes.

I used a toothpick to move the frosting around to make sure the color was filled in and there weren't any gaps.

For the 'knot' part of the scarf I just squeezed out a big blob of the burgundy frosting. Seriously.
I then made stripes with the gold on each side of the knot, and then drew three lines with the burgundy to make it look like the fringes on the end of a scarf.
I then put the cake in the fridge for a little bit while I worked on the cupcakes.

Once the frosting had hardened a little in the fridge I was able to go around the 'scarf' and smooth it down a little bit so it didn't look so messy.
I had also tinted some frosting black so I was ready to put on the details.
I started with his glasses.
Just two big circles and a little arch connecting them.

The scar was next,

and then I decided to give him some hair.

I was planning on leaving it like that, but my son came in the room and said Harry needed a smile so that was added as well.

Looking back at the pictures I'm still debating if I should have given him pupils, or a nose, or something else...but like I said, the birthday boy loved it so we'll leave it at that! Ha ha.