Can you honestly expect anyone to throw a Harry Potter themed birthday without preparing a banquet fit for the Great Hall? Well, I tried. Mine was probably more akin to a banquet prepared by Kreacher but still wizardy enough to impress a mere muggle.

If you need some inspo for your catering Pottermore have an impressive food-o-graphic to get you started, there are also approximately a thousand magical menus and cocktail conjuring web pages out there. But I like to show my readers things that are obtainable without breaking the crafting budget. So get out your bibs and lets eat!

Hagrid's cakey-cake-cake

THAT birthday cake!! We all know the one. It's Harry's 11th birthday and he has been dragged to a lighthouse with the Dursleys. Hagrid arrives to deliver Harry's Hogwarts invitation, Harry's first ever birthday cake and his salvation. It is an iconic cake. Hagrid is not known for his culinary skills so this is a perfect cake that anyone can make because, frankly, the worse it looks, the more authentic it is. My cake is a chocolate mud cake with coconut ganache filling. Coconut ganache filling is my favourite and no-one ever wants it, but this is my birthday cake so I'll do what I want. The icing is Solite buttercream which is so simple to make and really stable in all sorts of weather. I made it musk flavour, because once more - it's my birthday. I watched a great tutorial by Let's Eat Fiction! and dragged up a whole lot of reference images from the web. I divided out a small portion of icing and put it to the side. I coloured the remaining icing using red food colouring and a touch of brown to give it that dirty pink look. The icing I put aside was coloured green using a mixture of Christmas Green and Teal. I smeared the pink icing roughly across the cake starting with the sides and working to the top (this stops the layers sliding around). Using the toothpick tip from the video I gently etched in the letters, then messily piped over the top with the green. If you don't have a piping bag and tip - don't despair - you can make a temporary piping bag out of baking paper. Put the cake in a white cake box and you have yourself an authentic 11th birthday cake.

Potions for drinks

I'm just gonna say it. I didn't make Butterbeer. Don't judge me. I searched high and low (at Woolworths - the night before my party) to find Butterscotch syrup and I couldn't find it. At that stage of the game I had to cut my losses. Luckily I had made these little potion bottles for my guests to enjoy. The talented Pam at Over the Big Moon has made some excellent and free Harry Potter drink label printables. I purchased four four-packs of Bundaberg drinks. These are non-alcoholic and are a perfect shape, size and colour to pass off as potions. I selected the flavours: Spiced Ginger Beer, Traditional Lemonade, Guava, and Apple Cider. Unfortunately the printable was not big enough to cover the Bundaberg labels so I cut a strip of plain black card and used that along with the printable. I used a piece of sticky-tape on the back to hold the whole thing together. Best thing was not telling the guests what the flavours were. Make sure you recycle the bottles at the end of the party!

Honeyduke's Chocolate Frogs

Classically one of the first wizarding sweets that Harry is introduced to by Ron on the Hogwarts Express. The distinct box contains a collectable wizard or witch card and a magical chocolate frog. I used this instructable to make the box and the cards. It was not as quick as I would have hoped and therefore I only made two! But they are very impressive for guests so it depends where you want to focus your crafting efforts. I also opted to purchased chocolate frogs but I see that other's on the web make their own chocolates. There is also the option to purchase a Cinereplica kit from The Store of Requirement.

Delicious snacks

The banquet tables was scattered with an assortment of half-arsed snacks. Like I mentioned earlier, it's about where you want to spend your crafting efforts and this is where I took a massive short-cut - and I have no shame about it.

Hagrid's Rock Cakes - a packet of chocolate chip cookies. Dumbledore's Cockroach Clusters - a packet of chocolate covered almond slithers from our pantry. Wingless Snitches - a bowl of Ferrero Rocher's. There are so many tutorials on making Golden Snitches but these bad-boys were grounded!

I purchased test-tube style containers from Ikea and filled them with assorted 'potions ingredients'. My sister made a plate of delicious Mrs. Weasley corned beef sandwiches. Odd flavoured chips were mixed together in a bowl. I scattered other sweets and a string of fairy light from the $2 shop across the table. I placed glass bottles full of my unfulfilled intentions across the banquet to complete the look.

Viola! magical banquet.