So what would you say if someone asked you to make a cake based on a book you've never read? I guess you could gracefully decline the offer and refer the client to another, more well-read, baker. You could quickly skim through book to try to get the general gist of the story-line and characters. Maybe you could even rent the movie version and watch a few frames to get some images and ideas to transfer into frosting and cake. All three of those options sound feasible. Unfortunately, I am basically incapable of saying "no," I don't read (sorry, Brown University education), and the Harry Potter movie scared the living daylights out of me within the first 5 minutes of sitting down to watch it. So I was in a pickle. I agreed to make a cake for a 6-year-old Harry-Potter-obsessed neighbor of mine here in Berkeley that would make her eyes light up and hopefully evoke the magical spirit of a story, and whole imaginary world, I knew nothing about. I tried to google "Harry Potter" and all the search results seemed to be written in a foreign language... words like "Hogwart" and "Quidditch" kept popping up. So I decided to talk to an expert... a woman who had read every book. She gave me the quick run-down, re-enacting a few scenes for me, and eventually I was able to piece together enough to make a cake.Apparently there's a scene in one of the books where Harry is led to a room full of spiders, so I made lots of milk and dark chocolate spiders. Then I found an image of Harry's lightening bolt scar on his forehead, and hand-cut this shape out of rolled fondant. I made some topsy-turvy cakes, staked them asymmetrically on top of each other, covered it in frosting and purple and black glitter sprinkles and placed a chocolate "sorting hat" on top of a hand-made fondant stool. Our birthday girl was thrilled. Phew.
