Harry Potter Party: Potions Class

This is the 6th in a series of posts about our Harry Potter Birthday Party. You can read our other posts at the links below:

The Hogwarts Acceptance Letter
Invitation and Costumes
The Guests Arrive
Diagon Alley

The Sorting Hat Ceremony

After the party guests were sorted into houses, they went to their first class...Potions! Each student got out the goblet that they had purchased at Diagon Alley and gathered around the kitchen counter.
We had arranged all the potion ingredients earlier.

I added the dry ice in the cauldron at the last minute. We found the crow at the Dollar Store and attached him to the cauldron with hot glue.

Notice the chicken bones hanging from the light fixture! A nice touch from my teenagers!

Each party guest was able to choose from one of three potions:
A Beautification Potion
A Love Potion- Amortentia
Or A Luck Potion- Felix Felicis

We decided that we wanted our potions to actually taste good. So we used a list of Potion Ingredients from the Harry Potter books and attached an edible beverage or powder or solid to each ingredient.

For example:
Bat Spleen were actually Gushers! The recipe had the kids squish the liquid from the bat spleens into their potions! They loved that!

Stardew was actually honey. Here is the gorgeous container that my daughters put the honey into.

Our favorite ingredient was Pufferfish Eyes. I went to our local frozen yogurt store and bought Popping Bobas! Have you seen these before? You can add them as a topping to your frozen yogurt concoction. They come in different flavors. I got the mango flavored ones. They actually taste delicious but are perfectly slimy for a potion.

Each recipe included a liquid such as Sprite or Lemonade or Cranberry Juice with suitable potion names such as Mermaid Tears, Dragon's Blood, and Unicorn Blood.

Each recipe also included a solid. We used Pufferfish Eyes (Bobas), Baneberries (Blackberries) and Pond Slime (Smashed Kiwis)!

Each recipe also included a powder. We used Nightshade (dry Kool-Air Powder - the kind with the sugar already added), Exploding Ginger Eyelash (Pop Rocks), and Ground Mandrake Root (Crystal Light Powder).

We found our fun potions containers at Dollar Stores, Thrift Stores, and Hobby Lobby. We collected them a little bit at a time over the summer and had so much fun filling and arranging them before the party started.

Once each guest had chosen his or her potion, they began mixing them up according to the recipe instructions. We had some metal measuring spoons and cups that we set out for measuring out the ingredients.

You can find all of our recipes and the ingredient list here.

The kids had so much fun mixing their potions. They had even more fun drinking them! When it was time to go to the next class, most of the witches and wizards didn't want to leave. (Of course, Snape wasn't able to make it to our Potions class. That was probably why it was so fun for our students from Gryffindor and Ravenclaw.)


We had laminated the recipes and the party guests were able to add them to their bags to take home. After Potions was over, we moved on to our next class: Divination. Stay tuned for our post about Divination and our amazing Professor Trelawny next week!