Harry Potter Sugar Mice with Sour Sghetti Tails

Sugar Mice for a Harry Potter Party

In my search for sweets for my son's Harry Potter party, I fixated on a few things. Chocolate frogs,butterbeer, and these sugar mice.

I've looked through quite a few recipes, looking for something that was easy, inexpensive and tasty. I learned that real sugar mice, classically, use cotton strings for the tail. But in some of the recipes I found, they had licorice strings. I realized that I had already packages of "sour sghetti" that I got on sale and they would be perfect. I also found some recipes that were basically fondant.... like the kind people frost wedding cakes with. Those were all pretty high maintenance recipes. In the end, I decided to go for the simplest. I didn't use a sugar mice recipe at all, rather I went for a butter mint recipe, but I skipped the mint entirely, and flavored it with vanilla, since I knew I would be using the sour sghetti, I thought plain sugar mice would go better with the fruity sour taste than mint.

Vanilla Sugar Mice

1/4 cup softened butter.

1/3 cup sweetened condensed milk.

3 1/4 cup powdered sugar. 

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp vanilla

sour 'sghetti or other long thin candy strings

Mix butter, condensed milk, vanilla and salt with a stand mixer or hand mixer until smooth. Add the sugar a little bit at a time and mix until it reaches a consistency of firm play dough. 

You might need to add more powdered sugar to make it stiffer or more condensed milk to soften it up. When it feels right, you can start modelling the mice.

 Here I've illustrated the process.

First I take out some sugar dough and roll it into long snakes.

Then divide the snakes into more or less even  pieces. You don't want the mice to be too big, because that's a lot of sugar for one bite, so aim for marble size ball.

Roll your pieces into marble balls.

Take your marble balls and press the end of your sghetti string into the ball.

Pinch the ball so that it surrounds the sghetti string.

Mold the squooshed piece into a pear shape, largest shape near the tail. Pinch the nose so it is vaguely mouse shaped.

Take two tiny dots of sugar dough, pinch them flat between your fingers and then pinch onto the mouse where the ears would be. Try to keep the dough warm/workable before you add the ears, because as it starts drying it gets less sticky. 

Poke tiny dots into the face of the mouse to serve as dots. You can also add tiny frosting eyes, but I thought the impressions worked fine.

And there is your mouse.

I even found that the extra step of adding the ears, while cute, isn't really necessary. They still look enough like mice when it is just the pear shaped dough with the eyeballs pressed in. I bet you could also use little round sprinkles as eyeballs, too. That would be cute.

Let them dry for a day or two to harden. And then serve to all the wizard wannabes.