Halloween and Harry Potter Butterbeer

Halloween is right around the corner! While I'm not thrilled about the colder weather, I love this time of year. Starting with Halloween, we get into this festive, celebratory, holiday party mode that lasts up until New Years. I've shared a picture of our puggle Phoebe who we dressed as a "piggle" for the APF's Howl-o-ween event last weekend. Isn't she cute??? :)

Unfortunately, it looks like our party-plans may be on hold due to a nasty bug that's been going around. (I said "adult" originally here, and then realized that it sounded a little worse than a whole bunch of late 20- and 30-somethings getting dressed up and throwing a few back at a house party.)

However, we're still planning to hand out loads and loads of candy on Sunday, and we've planned a Harry Potter marathon that day -- mostly because the first installment of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is coming out, and I absolutely hate gory movies (think the Saw series), so wizarding movies seemed like a decent Halloween choice. Plus, we've seen the movies so many times that answering the doorbell won't be that big of a deal!

Anyway - to make it a little special, I started looking for recipes for Harry Potter's Butterbeer.

The first recipe for Butterbeer I found was on Shine, and it looked pretty good, consisting of ginger ale or club soda, butterscotch sauce, vanilla ice cream, and optionally rum. Sounds like a yummy version of a soda float! Still, I figured, let's see what other people have to say on the topic.

MuggleNet, the authoritative source on this type of thing, suggests using club or cream soda, butterscotch sauce, and real butter. Hmm... this sounds a little too buttery for my taste.

I found a similar news article that also suggested the addition of rum extract -- definitely a possibility.

And finally, I found a site that aggregated 10 different butterbeer recipes.

The most interesting ones I found on the site were Recipe #2, which called for an entire CUP of Butterscotch Schnapps and 7 cups of cream soda (Now, I've been known to make some pretty lethal punch, but that seems like a lot!)

Now, Recipe #4 calls for root beer OR cream soda, honey, and butter. Now, this is the first recipe that I've seen that actually calls for root beer (after all, it's butter BEER). That's promising.

However, Recipes #9 and #10 look the best.

Recipe #9 calls for vanilla ice cream, root beer, butterscotch syrup, and whipped cream with chopped nuts. It's basically a glorified root beer float, but yum!

Recipe #10 calls for vanilla ice cream, butter, brown sugar, spices, and sparkling apple cider, which just sounds yummy.

I think we're going to go with root beer, either Vanilla or Edy's butter pecan ice cream, and butterscotch sauce. Perhaps a little bit of dark rum for those of us who haven't come down with this horrible bug.

What are your plans for Halloween???