A Butterbeer Recipe You Can Make At Home!

I promised all of you my Butterbeer recipe, and here it is! Butterbeer is well known for being a very popular beverage in the Harry Potter books and can be found at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter for all the fans to sample. My recipe here was adapted from a few that I found online. The reasons why I adapted them from the ones I saw online were because they mostly asked for butterscotch syrup, marshmallow fluff, freshly whipped butter, condensed milk, ice cream and so on and so forth. The drink at Universal Studios wasn't as complicated in terms of flavour and texture, so to speak. It was a fizzy, transparent, deep brown liquid and creamy froth that was a bit on the buttery side.

I hunted down the basics and put it together, and I pretty much got the proportions right on my second try. My first try had the same amount of butterscotch schnapps to vodka and I found it too sharp and quite alcoholic in flavour when butterbeer in the books were meant to be sickly sweet and does not inebriate kids and adults alike. This adaptation tastes very, very similar to the one at the park. I don't have a non-alcoholic version of this recipe, but I imagine a butterscotch flavouring would do the job of replacing the schnapps just fine, and skip the vodka.

This recipe is for one large stein of butterbeer, though you could divide it into two regular glasses. I used light whipped cream because I think it imparts a much fluffier foam though I haven't tried it with full-fat whipped cream. I used the ready-made whipped cream, not fresh cream that has been whipped by hand.

Ingredients:
350ml cream soda
60ml butterscotch schnapps
15ml vodka
1 cup of light whipped cream
Extra 5ml of butterscotch schnapps

Directions:
1. Pour the cream soda into the mug or glass and add the 60ml of butterscotch schnapps and vodka. Mix together with the spoon.
2. In a bowl, combine the remaining ingredients until the cream becomes more fluid than solid, like thick creamy foam.
3. Pouring the cream or sloshing it into the mug will mar the crisp appearance of the beer, so gently spoon it onto the surface of the butterbeer. Serve.

I would like to take a moment to say that please don't add the soda to the cream, because it tends to react with cream and make it bubble and froth like crazy, much like when you drop a scoop of ice cream into a glass of coca cola. I discovered this when I decided to add the last of my beer mix from the jug into the mug, and lo and behold, it went mad. The following photo was taken before it started overflowing completely and making a mess on my board. There are large pockets of air in the froth and it looks quite uneven.

Not so pretty, right?

I hope you all enjoyed this post as much as I enjoyed making the butterbeer for the photos and then drinking it afterwards. This is a particularly sweet beverage so I must warn you all of the possibility that your teeth may rot and fall out afterwards.

Serve this along with some homemade Exploding Bon Bons and Pumpkin Pasties and you've got yourself the perfect spread for a Harry Potter party.

Are you going to make this recipe at home? Let me know how it goes and if there is anything you'd change.