I used to work for a man who didn’t mind when I called him Voldemort, Harry Potter’s dark lord of evil. That kind of gives you an indication of how strange and twisted he was. Having said that, he wasn’t 100% awful, he definitely had moments of being kind and nice but mostly, and until he got married he was a strange tyrant that you could hear demanding things like a petulant baby his loud vice roaring across the room “All I want is….” was a frequent cry.
“Expecto Patronum!” I used to mutter under my breath during this time. Luckily he only had the vaguest understanding of the Harry Potter series. These two words in the book were what Harry or other wizards would say when needed a protector and a weapon against predators and Dementors. I was hoping that the spell would work to appease tyrannical bosses.
The Harry Potter series is one of my favourite series of books, ever. I’m not much into the fantasy genre but there was something that immediately grabbed me (and millions of others). I love the way the author J.K. Rowling’s mind works and how imaginative she is. And like with many of my favourite books there is also an element of food. One of the foods that she created was Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Jelly Beans. These are like muggle or non magical jelly beans except that there is a huge range of flavours good and bad. Alongside more regular flavours there were ones like earwax, bogey, vomit and dirt. As such they were marketed as “Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans – A Risk With Every Mouthful!”
And I woke up one day and said out loud in excitement “These would be perfect for Halloween!”
I didn’t quite have any inclination to replicate a vomit flavoured jelly bean but I decided to make jelly beans in a variety of flavours including some not so nice or non traditional jelly bean flavours mixed in with your regular flavours. Having a look in my spell cupboard… ahem pantry I took out the following flavours: coconut, chocolate, pear, black pepper, lemon myrtle, vindaloo curry, violet and strawberry and paired them with colours.
Finding a recipe for jelly beans was hard-very hard indeed. What I realised is that nobody really makes jelly beans because they are easy and cheap to buy. But because I was under the Confundus charm spell I paid no heed of the warning and made a batch without having any molds and they just melded into one and didn’t look even vaguely jelly bean shaped. I regrouped and bought some molds that in truth look more like mini Easter egg molds than jelly bean molds although they were sold as the latter, and made them again. The flavour of these jelly beans was distinct. Clear and quite scary for people picking up a red jelly bean and expecting a hot cinnamon or strawberry jelly bean and instead getting a mouthful of garlickly vindaloo!
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