The Butterbeer Experience

It would be so much easier to blog if I wasn’t so crazy tired and if I didn’t smell like smoke…maybe a shower is in order first?? Yea, I think so. Alright back in a flash.

That was nice. I don’t smell like smoke anymore and it’s amazing how much a shower can wake you up. Why do I smell like smoke? Glad to answer. First let me say: Happy Valentine’s Day! Second: I smell like smoke because I spent the evening at one of my best friend’s house pretty much having the most amazing Valentine’s Day that I’ve had in years.

I’m the anti-Valentine’s Day sort of girl, if I can forget that it’s couples day, the better, but this year my brother has a girlfriend and sadly I’m not all that fond of her. My brother was going to make her a nice fancy dinner (by fancy I mean steak and potatoes) and they were going to be all mushy gushy all night. Naturally, I wanted to get out of the house and let the couple (and my parents) have their V-day fun. Dilemma—where to go? That’s when one of my besties, Kim, said that I could come over to her place and we could play Harry Potter video games. Sounded good to me! Anything to get me out of the house.

But then it hit me. It had been something we had been discussing doing for a very long time, but we didn’t ever have the right time to do it. This seemed like the perfect time. We were going to make butterbeer! Butterbeer? Yeah, you know that drink from the Harry Potter books that they were always buying at the three broomsticks! We wanted to make some! So why not do it on our dateless Valentine’s Day?

So everything was ready to go. I took a trip to Giant Eagle, even though I was almost prevented by the snow, around five in the afternoon in order to get the ingredients that I needed. But I never realized that I knew so little about Giant Eagle and its layout. Seriously, I walked around that store for maybe twenty minutes without finding ANYTHING I was looking for. Who knew everything I was looking for was actually within four isles of each other. I finally gotten so fed up with walking around pointlessly not knowing where I was going, that I picked up my phone and called Km just so I could complain to her that I couldn’t find anything. I was actually on the other side of the store when I finally asked a man who was placing laundry detergent on the shelves, “Where can I find ice cream toppings?”

He didn’t even look up to me before answering sharply, “Isle 6.”

So, ice cream topping = isle six. Let me know if that’s true at your Giant Eagles too!

Anyway, I finally got the club soda and the butterscotch for the butterbeer, but I still had the dilemma of finding candy hearts. Where were they? It was Valentine’s Day, they had to be somewhere, but I just couldn’t find them. I couldn’t find them in the candy area. Turns out I was actually just blind and they were with the V-day candy. Sadly though we had to settle for very sour ones. But hey, candy is still candy.

So finally I got to Kim’s house. Our little ‘party’ consisted of her, me, her sister Nikki (who is also a very close friend of mine and who I am coincidently talking to on AIM right now), their mom, and their mom’s boyfriend. We spent the earlier part of the night watching Nikki sew clothes for poor children in Africa and listening to WizRock while dinner was cooking. Kim and I often dream about having our own wizrock band called “The Quibbler” which is one of the few good Harry Potter references yet taken. We decided our first song was going to be called “Polyjuice.” This decision can from the random lyric created by Kim picking out a candy heart that said “You & me” but her thinking it said “You are me” It resulted in me singing, “You are me, I am you, that’s what Polyjuice does to you.” And that’s as far as our song has gone. It will be a hit I promise. Our only musical hope though comes from Nikki who plays the flue. At least until I master the guitar, which could take years. So will you be hearing from “The Quibbler” anytime soon? Probably not. But we’ll keep you updated.

After dinner, and after a lot more Harry Potter based discussions one in which included looking up which house Luna Lovegood was from (I lost by the way thinking she was a Hufflepuff). And after many more candy hearts that we read completely wrong, (The writing on one was so messed up I thought it said Barty Crouch. And there were many that said DIVA but we thought said DNA.) we finally did get around to making butterbeer. I documented basically the entire thing in photos and it really wasn’t complicated to do. Butterbeer is simply butter and butterscotch heated up with club soda added to it. So it was actually rather quick and simple to make, it was just a lot of fun. No one has ever informed Nikki it seems that club soda is caffeinated because she was really surprised when it exploded on her. We pretty much spent a good portion of our butterbeer making, not making butterbeer, but dancing around to some radio station that I didn’t even know to Michael Jackson and other music that normally isn’t on the radio. You know, those songs you never hear, but you know nearly every word to anyway.

Butterbeer is great! It is supper fizzy and really sweet. Like they say in the HP books, it really does have a sort of warming effect, but I didn’t think it tasted very good cold. Eh, it could just be me. The rest of the night consisted of Harry Potter video games in which I just moved the control sticks around widely popping out random spells that I didn’t even know and in turn winning every duel. Not going to lie, winning gets boring after awhile and instead we opening the first Harry Potter book and I read to Kim and Nikki adding in my own little comments.

1. I had no idea that the first chapter took place BEFORE Harry’s parents were dead, so the entire first two pages I was like WTF is going on. (I would like to defend this by saying it has been maybe eight years since I have READ the first books proving the movies can really mess things up. Not that they aren’t great movies.)

2. I liked making comments on what things Mr. Dursley hated. Such as people walking around in cloaks because how dare people wear things that they want to.

3. I eventually skipped to the middle of the book to Draco and Harry’s first meeting (which I had totally forgotten WAS NOT at Hogwarts but in Diagon Alley) and read all of Draco’s lines with a southern accent. I must point out that it fits him well. Maybe not his overall character, but the way he talks just fits too well.

Basically, best V-day ever! I wish it wasn’t over. I had so much fun.
Conclusions from the night: Ice cream topping= isle 6....Butterbeer=awesome…Draco Malfoy= should be southern.

Hope you all had a great V-day as well!