Every year for our annual Harry Potter party, we come up with a new way to randomly sort our guests into houses! One year we made Mandrake Dirt Pudding Pots for our guests and when they pulled their baby mandrakes out, the color of the “dirt” revealed their house! Here’s how we did it…

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Traditional “dirt pudding” is made by layering chocolate pudding with crushed up oreo pieces. We gave ours a twist by adding our baby mandrakes and a layer of pudding beneath the surface that would reveal the house that each guest would be competing for at the party.

Let’s start with the supplies and ingredients…

• Mini clay pots (like these from Michaels or Amazon)
• Mini shot glass-sized solo cups (like these from Amazon)
• Cute little plastic babies like these from Amazon
• Fake leaves to make the mandrakes’ “hair” – we cut ours from some strands of fake ivy (like these from Amazon )
• Chocolate pudding
• Vanilla pudding
• Food coloring in the 4 house colors
• Oreos

And now to the preparation… First make the puddings! We used boxed pudding and made it following the directions on the box. You can keep your chocolate pudding in one big bowl but you’ll need to divide the vanilla into 4 parts so that you can add the food coloring.

We put our vanilla into 4 ziplock baggies and then slowly mixed in drops of food coloring until the colors were to our liking. (We accidentally ended up with neon food coloring so that’s why our house colors are a little brighter than the traditional colors but it still worked!)

Next we crushed up our oreos to make the “dirt” – we put them in a large plastic bag and used a rolling pin to crush them up.

Now it’s time to assemble the dirt pudding cups. We used the mini solo cups because they fit perfectly inside our tiny pots. We started with the vanilla on the bottom, making sure to make the same number of each color so that we would have even teams. We just cut a small piece of the corner to the ziplock baggies and it was easier to squeeze just the right amount into the cups.

Next we added a layer of chocolate pudding – making sure to cover the vanilla pudding entirely so that our guests wouldn’t be able to see what color was underneath! And then we topped it off with some oreo crumbles.

The last part was making the dirt pudding into mandrakes! We ordered a pack of tiny plastic babies (like these from Amazon) that might normally be used for a baby shower or a mardi gras kings cake. And then cut some leaves off of a strand of fake ivy to glue on top of the babies’ heads. Our fake ivy was leftover from decorations for another event but you can buy it on Amazon (though it may be way more than you need!).

We hot glued the leaves to the babies a few days before to make sure the glue had dried so when we were preparing the puddings, we just had to push our mandrakes into the top. They turned out great!

For the sorting ceremony, we had everyone pick a mandrake (earmuffs were encouraged!) and stand in a circle to play a “left-right” game like the one in this post! Then at the end of the game, everyone pulled their mandrake out of their pot to see which house they were in.

It was a fun and yummy way to sort all of our guests into their Hogwarts House! Check out this post for more ideas for throwing an awesome Harry Potter party or this one for a fun Harry Potter party game!

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