Butterbeer Ice Cream: Some Book Magic Turned Edible

My obsession with making ice cream continues with a slight turn towards my other favorite fan girl-ing interest--fantasy and sci-fi. I'm proud to say that I'm part of that group of kiddos that had the special privilege of growing up with Harry Potter. I take it as an assumption that anyone I meet that is my age has read Harry Potter. And if they haven't, I will happily give them either my paperback set, or my Chinese set if they read Chinese (unlike me LOL). If they want to read the British version of the first book, I have that as well. The hardcovers I can't loan out for two reasons. One, the third book's spine is broken after being read a few too many times out of love (there could be some excellent, albeit somewhat weird book reading and love comparisons going on here, but I'll just leave this song from Stars instead). The second reason I can't loan them out is the typical sentiment reason. I have certain memories relate to the purchase/reading of each of them that I will list below because its my food blog and if I want to have a list about my Harry Potter memories on it, I can. 

1. Sorcerer's Stone: Thank goodness for Scholastic Book orders or it might have taken me a lot longer to find these books.
2. Chamber of Secrets: Birthday present from my mother. She hid it at the top of our kitchen cabinet (ha! a food connection!) and gave it to me during my very special sleepover birthday with my (I think) three closest friends at the time. I still talk to two of them (if I'm remembering the right people).
3. Prisoner of Azkaban: Well, as I noted above, I destroyed the spine of this one. Probably my favorite out of the series.
4. Goblet of Fire: I read this once while sitting on the ledge near my family's dining table while my parents were having a dinner party. I think I wanted attention. The chapter "Padfoot Returns" smelled really bad for some reason.
5.  Order of the Phoenix: Remember when these books would come out and you'd just see a giant stack of them in Costco on a wood flatbed? Those were amazing times that solidified my love for Costco.
6. Half Blood Prince: Another one I bought at Costco and started reading while in Costco.
7. Deathly Hallows: Couldn't wait to go to Costco to buy it so I preordered on Amazon. Had to volunteer the day it was release and forced my sister to finish reading it during the day so that I could read it when I got back. Finished around 2 or 3 in the morning I think. 

Now that I have some of the theoretical readers of this blog in a fantasy book-induced nostalgia, let's talk ice cream. Or rather, foods inspired by fictional works first. It's somewhat amusing to think that a magical food/drink such as butterbeer has an "official recipe" or "real taste" in the real world. A fictional drink item can't possibly have an official or real taste if its taste, textures, smells are described by a few well-chosen words filled in with rich imagination that differs from one reader to the next. The closest you could possibly get to "real" is the author's interpretation of the food. JK Rowling can taste the butterbeer at the Warner Brother's Studio Tour or at Universal Studios Orlando and say yes, this is the warm butterbeer that Harry would wrap his hands around while sitting amongst friends in Madame Rosmerta's or yes, this is the drink that created a lifelong addiction problem for Winky the house-elf. But, like any interpretation of a book, be it the themes associated with its imagery and diction or the relationships between characters, do readers have to accept that as the canon version of butterbeer? If people can actively and maybe even justly ship JohnLock, whose to say you can't have your own non-canon version of butterbeer that can get Winky drunk just as effectively? 

 

I pose that somewhat gratuitous question because I'm actually not a huge fan of the "real" butterbeer that I tried at both the Warner Brother's Studio Tour and in Orlando. It was really quite sweet and did not taste like the happy memories of a snowy Hogsmeade that I tend to associated it with. Plus, in the real world, I've never been a huge fan of butterscotch. However, I was a huge fan of 1) the pumpkin juice (duh), and 2) the frozen butterbeer. Frozen butterbeer at the Harry Potter theme park is more like a slushy with cream than something actually frozen. But since slushy butterbeer tasted better than chilled liquid butterbeer, the logical conclusion is that the colder the butterbeer, the better it is (based on a total of two data points of course). Hence, butterbeer ice cream.

Since we're talking about official/canon/real, it doesn't seem that the "official" recipe used by Universal or Warner Brother's is actually available online. There are dozens of different homemade versions of various difficulties and taste, so clearly lots of noncanon butterbeers are out there. I mean, we're talking butterbeer ice cream here, a treat that was definitely not mentioned in the novels, so I'm not even sure why I'm still amusing myself by trying to describe fiction-inspired food under canon/non-canon labels. Maybe its food commentary on the heated debates fandoms sometimes get into over the merits of maintaining canon in fanwork.

  

Recipe from Sweet Silly Chic. The butterscotch/butterbeer sauce used in her recipe is from a separate butterbeer recipe originally from The Huffington Post. This is by far one of the more complicated recipes for butterbeer I've seen, so I wouldn't necessarily suggest that this is the best recipe if you want a quick easy version of just the drink for parties. The butterscotch sauce did work very nicely for the ice cream though. I will note that the rum extract might be important for getting the full butterbeer taste. I didn't have any rum extract or dark rum, so I added in some tennessee honey whiskey, which I don't think *actually* did anything. The ice cream tasted more buttery than I would have liked in my butterbeer, but other people in my family seemed to enjoy it. Even my hard to satisfy mother.