2012 Vacation: Universal Studios

And the vacation posting begins... :) We left from the SLC airport Tuesday afternoon-ish to arrive in Florida that night (and it was pretty late for Florida time because they were two hours ahead of us. Most of us hadn't been on an airplane for a while so it was fun to be there again. Gracie absolutely loved it, being her first time on a plane, although as you can see below it also exhausted her.

We got to Florida late that night and then we still had to go pick up our rental car, which took a while. When we got to the hotel, they of course didn't put our rooms next to each other so we were separated--me, Carina, and Sidney in one room and my parents, Gracie, and Cee Ryle in the other. My sisters and I actually went to one room and it smelled a lot like smoke, which we weren't fans of, so we had to ask the people to give us a different key and switch us. Kind of annoying and I don't remember what time we finally got to bed but it was pretty late. And add onto that no dinner because all we'd had on the plane were snacks they provided.

The next morning we woke up early because Universal Studios opened up at 8 am and we wanted to get there when it opened. Let me remind you though, that this was 6 am our time and since we had gone to bed so late, we didn't get much sleep. The hotel had a continental breakfast, but their idea of breakfast was bagels and orange juice. So we didn't get much for breakfast either. We got to Universal Studios at about 8:30 and our tiredness was replaced by huge excitement instead!

First stop? Harry Potter world of course! All of us were beyond excited for this, especially me! This is what it looked like when we came in, although it wasn't this busy yet (this picture was taken later in the day):

We had to take a picture by the famous Hogwarts Express and I of course brought my wand with me! I don't know if I've said this before, but man, it feels so natural to carry a wand around. Call me crazy, but I love it. The whole place was so cool and so very realistic. Everywhere you turned made it seem like you were living in the magical world. Even the bathrooms had Moaning Myrtle's voice floating through!

There aren't a ton of rides (only like three) and the really worthwhile one to go on is the Journey Through Hogwarts ride. Man was it sweet! And while you were walking to the ride, you felt like you were walking through Hogwarts, seeing places like Dumbledore's office and the Herbology classrooms. The ride made you feel like you were flying on a broom with Harry, Ron, and Hermione. I don't know how they did it but it felt so realistic! They had you put your stuff in lockers before you went on the ride, which is a good thing, because I kept my phone with me in my pocket but I almost lost it on the ride because it flew around so much!

Honeydukes was awesome! They had all the food from the books and movies and it was all so amazing and real...and expensive. I'm sure everything would have tasted delicious but the only thing I got was Pumpkin Juice...and MAN was that good! New favorite drink! I still have the taste in my mouth and it was completely worth every penny.

After Harry Potter world was Suess Landing, an area of the park based entirely off of Dr. Seuss books. Gracie loved it of course, but it all was really pretty fun. I do have to say that one reason I love going to amusement parks with my family is because I hate big roller coasters so it means that I'm not pressured to ride them since there's usually someone else who also won't want to. We had fun going on rides here and meeting different characters, although Gracie was a little scared of the Cat in the Hat and we had to really push her to take a picture with Things 1 and 2.

They had this cool little walk through place with all kinds of fun Dr. Suess stuff that you just did on your own. The machine Sidney is stepping on below made funny sounds when you stepped on it.

There were other cool areas of the park as well, like the Marvel area and Toon Lagoon.

We went back to Harry Potter world to eat lunch at the Three Broomsticks, and lets just say it did not disappoint. It looked just like it did in the movie and food was delicious and totally belonged. And Butterbeer...yum! It was soooo good :) The froth at the top of it was the best.

I really liked this conductor guy..he had a British accent and was talking to me just like I was a really Hogwarts student. Really funny and cool!

We had to take a picture by the houses because on Pottermore so far all of us are in different houses (except for Carina, who hasn't been sorted yet)! So Carina stood by Hufflepuff, I was Ravenclaw (the best house, obviously!), Cee Ryle was Gryffindor, and Sidney was Slytherin. We are so cool.

There was a little show/ride thing called Poseidon's Fury in the Land of Adventure. Here are my sibs waiting in line. It was a cool show that you walked through and the rooms kept changing and getting bigger with lots of water and fire and special effects. Definitely a favorite.

We went on this water ride that we thought was just going to be a gentle normal ride where we got fairly wet. We didn't want to get too soaked and also my mom, Sidney, and I really don't like big drops in roller coasters or anything. And since Gracie was tall enough to go on this ride we figured it couldn't be too bad. But it turns out that we got incredibly soaked from this unexpected huge drop at the end of the ride. It took a picture but it was a lot to buy it, but it was so funny. Carina was covering Gracie's eyes, Cee Ryle looked like a hyper maniac and the rest of us were shocked or closing our eyes. I wish I had a copy of the picture because it was so funny!

Meet Popeye and Olive. I'm not in a lot of these characters because I ended up being the photographer for them.

I thought this picture was funny :)

They had this pixie stix candy stuff in Suess Landing that wasn't too much money so we each got 3 foot long (the longest ones they had) sticks of them. Lots of candy=lots of deliciousness (and unhealthiness ha).

Universal Studios closed at 6 and we actually got to do everything that we wanted to do in the park, which was great. But dang were we tired by the time we were done. Living off of little sleep and only one meal (though it was a big one) tired us out and when we got back to the hotel, we laid on our beds, watched a little bit of Disney Channel and then fell soundly asleep, awaiting to go on our cruise the next day... :)

[Ultimate Harry Potter Party] The Food

The food of this party was well, probably the best part of it all. You read about all the different foods in Harry Potter, but that's usually it. You're always wondering what Butterbeer tastes like or if all those sweets on the train are all they're made out to be. So Katie and I decided to bring those foods to life as best as we could, with our time, resources, and money (remember, we're poor college students!). We spent so much time on all the food, but it was all so very worth it. I don't take credit for any of the recipes because we found pretty much all of them online--just tweaked a little bit--so if you want to make any these foods, I'll link to them so you can bring the magic of Harry Potter to your home.

So first, the drinks:

Gillywater:

We knew we were going to need some kind of a drink besides the Butterbeer and Firewhiskey that people could have and that everyone would like. So we got some Invisible Kool-aid from the grocery store that looks like water but tastes like Kool-aid. I looked up "harry potter drinks" online and Gillywater was one of the things that came up because apparently it's mentioned in the books once or something. So all the Gillywater was was Invisible Kool-aid. Easy enough.

Cost: $0.30 (two kool-aid packages) + free (already had sugar and water) = $0.30

Firewhiskey:

We decided we wanted Firewhiskey mostly just so everyone could taste it and we could have some fun with it. All we did for this was mix Ginger Ale with some Tabasco sauce. I'll admit, I never tried it, but it was hilarious to see everyone's reactions when they did, because it obviously wasn't what they were expecting! It made your throat burn for about 10 minutes afterward so kind of funny. The drink fit the name perfectly!

Cost: $2 (two 2-liter bottles of ginger ale) + $0.69 (tabasco sauce) = $2.69

Butterbeer!:

Wow. Words cannot describe how delicious and perfect butterbeer was. It was everything that you wanted it to be from reading the books and such. Oh, it was soooo good! This one took a little bit longer to make but I think we used the best recipe on the internet we found. There were some recipes where you could just use a few ingredients to make something kind of like it, but we wanted the real thing! So we used this recipe to make it, and I would definitely recommend the recipe to anyone who wants to try Butterbeer.  It was so legit and so good. Go home and make it and I promise you won't be disappointed. The only thing we left out  of the recipe was the apple cider vinegar because we didn't know where it was in the store and it might have been a little pricey. Not a surprise to us, the Butterbeer was the first thing that we ran out of (we had two pots of it) and it was definitely the favorite of the drinks, if not of all the food. I'm telling you, it was great!

Trying Butterbeer for the first time. That smile on my face was because I was drinking heaven :)

Cost: $2 (two 2-liter bottles of cream soda) + $1 (margarine--in place of butter) + Free (already had salt) + $4 (brown sugar) + $3 (cream) = $10 (maybe a little much for a drink but totally worth it for Butterbeer!)

 And now for the food! :)

Acid Pops:

I got the idea of these from here. A lot of our recipes came from The Pastry Affair, because her site kept popping up in searches for "harry potter food" and they were definitely the best quality recipes by far. I'd definitely recommend the site because she has a lot yummy and cute pastries, and the picture quality is great! The recipe said to use Pop Rocks, but they were a little bit more expensive and we thought we were going to need a lot. So instead we got those boxes of rainbow nerds that you can get for a dollar, crushed them up, dipped the suckers in water and then rolled it around in the crushed Nerds. These were sooo good. They were pretty sour, because you got the inside part of the nerd right away, but they were a nice treat for people to suck on while socializing or something. :)

Cost: $2 (two bags of lollipops) + $2 (two boxes of nerds) = $4

Chocolate Frogs:

All the recipes for chocolate frogs we found online were like making actual chocolate frogs with a mold and we did not have time or the resources to do that. So we got some of the Haribo gummy frogs and then dipped half of the them in chocolate (just from chocolate chips). You wouldn't think so, but gummy+chocolate=delish! This was probably one of my favorites of the food items!

Cost: $5.16 (4 bags of Haribo frogs @ $1.29/bag) + $1.50 (bag of chocolate chips) = $6.76

Licorice Wands:

We wanted to dip the wands in chocolate like done here, but we ran out of chocolate and time, so we just got Red Vines and put them out as is. Maybe another time we'll make these again and dip them in chocolate!

Cost: $3 (two bags of redvines)

Cockroach Clusters:

This recipe also came from here and all we did with this was melt chocolate chips and then mix chow-mein noodles in the chocolate. Super easy! And the noodles were pretty tasteless so the clusters as a whole tasted delicious because it was like crunchy chocolate..yum :)

Cost: $3 (two bags of chow-mein noodles) + $1.50 (bag of chocolate chips) = $4.50

Sorting Hats:

These were our own invention. With the Cauldron Cakes below, you have to cut out a portion of the cupcake so we were left with all these pointy cake things that looked like hats! So we went to the grocery store to get some oreos, stuck the cake part on with melted chocolate and called them sorting hats. There is actually no food in the HP books called "Sorting Hats" but we can be creative, right? :)

Cost: Free (cake insides) + $3 (one package of regular Oreo cookies) = $3

Pumpkin Pasties:

Mmmm, these were good! They don't look super appetizing in the picture, but I promise they tasted delicious. We found the recipe searching online and used this one. It seemed like all the other recipes were copying it so we went back to the original source. The thing we changed was that we just got those cans that have 10 uncooked biscuits in them, rolled them out and used that for the dough. It was a lot cheaper and easier than making our own! The Pumpkin Pasties took a while to make so while these were in the oven or cooking we were working on something else. Oh and we doubled the recipe to have more for our party guests.

Cost: $4 (two cans of pumpkin) + $4 (two cans of evaporated milk) + Free (we had everything else at home) = $8

Cauldron Cakes:

Aren't they so cute? These might have been my favorites (and many other people's) just because they look exactly like their name! These also took a while, and a lot of chocolate, but were very yummy and fun. I especially like the 3 chocolate chip "feet" at the bottom of the cauldron. We got the recipe for these from here. The only thing we changed was that we filled them with whipped cream instead of the marshmallow filling because once again, it was easier and cheaper. Super fun! This recipe was also doubled.

Cost: $2.60 (two cake mixes) + $3 (two bags of chocolate chips) + $5 (two cans of whipped cream--we didn't use it all though) =$10.60

Atomic Popcorn:
I'm sorry, for some reason I didn't take a picture of the popcorn! I just made my family's special recipe of popcorn as another filler food just so people had something to eat. I thought I was going to have to make a lot of batches but I ended up only having to make one batch, which was great. I just called it Atomic Popcorn, because I saw that name somewhere online and figured it fit the Harry Potter-esque food name.

The recipe for the popcorn is super easy and as follows:

1 1/2 tablespoons of canola or vegetable oil
1 tablespoon of coconut oil (this is optional if you don't have any--its expensive!)
1/2 cup of popcorn kernals
A little more than 1/2 teaspoon of popcorn salt

Put it all in a popcorn popper (or you could try a pot and cover the lid when the popcorn starts popping) on the stove on about medium-high heat, and keep stirring until all the popcorn is about done being popped or you can't stir anymore. Super easy and really good. Popcorn is big in my family and I probably eat it a few times a week haha.

Cost: Free (I already had all the ingredients)

Most of the food all gone at the end of the party!

Whew! That was a long post! And the food was definitely the thing that took the most time. But it was totally worth it because everyone was super impressed with it all and thought it was really good!

[Budget]
Invitations: $18
All the food: $52.85
Total so Far: $70.85

Tomorrow I'm going to be talking about our decorations and the set-up, so definitely come back to read...*hint* we had REAL animals there. Promise. Told ya you want to read about it!! ;)

To read the other posts about the party, click on these links:

Set-Up/Decorations

Invitations
Party Day!