The cover screams at you. It really screams. Just like an American wizard to print thousands of copies of a sales catalogue that just won’t shut up. Not until you give in, pull the catalog open with a sigh as the screeching voice finally quells itself, and entertain the living, charlatan scripture that guides you through a forest of candies and treats whose overseas shipping you can’t possibly afford. The enchanted catalogue can tell when you’re skimming, too, and obviously-disinterested readers tend to end up with paper cuts.
CHOCOLATE FAMILIARS are packaged as large, fist-sized chocolate eggs coated in shining, animated foil. Once you tap the tip of your wand to the top of the egg, the foil peels downwards, curling into a sort of nest-like bowl. The paper-thin shell then crumbles away to reveal a chocolate facsimile of a magical beast. The stronger the chocolate, the more frightening the creature: white-chocolate and milk-chocolate eggs might contain a tiny white mouse, siamese cat, or snowy owl, while a dark-chocolate egg could hide a thick-set rat, a skittering tarantula, or a speckled adder. Whether cuddly or creepy, the tiny fondue familiars are best friends with their owners until they get eaten.
The creatures weren’t chosen by the chocolatiers, but by an extremely complex charm cast on the candy during the chocolate-making process. The spell molded chocolate creatures into life based on the strength of the chocolate, and for the darkest chocolate eggs the spell wasn’t stable. Augustus’s “Dark Warlock” 97% Dark Chocolate Familiars turned out a couple of horrifying but safe familiars, like the egg filled with thousands of tiny sprinkle-like spiders, or the one that turned into a chocolate bicorn with a wafer horn. The discontinuation of the 97% line was only because Augustus wanted to be very, very sure that the chocolate basilisk would never, ever show up again.
ALMIGHTY AUGUSTUS’S GOBBLE-EM GOBLINS: these delicious, miniature, geared-up goblin figurines come in inexpensive packs of seven. Immediately after climbing out of their platoon box, these little un-meltable ice-cream goblins become vigilant fighters until death. Once a goblin dies, you’d better gobble it up quick: death breaks the freezing enchantment and it’ll start to melt. Since the creatures are made of ice cream and cannot carry projectiles, they all fight hand-to-hand, except for a few of the rarer soldiers who carry thick swords or axes. There are five “factions” of Gobble-Em Goblins, each with a differently-colored platoon box: Brownies, Cookie-Creamers, Orangey Creamsickers, Pistachioes, and Vanillers. Vanillers is the worst selling faction for some reason.
At just two sickles per box, imported—that’s a bit more than half a pound sterling—the company only makes a tiny profit on each Gobble-Em Goblin, and relies on large volume-of-sale to bump up revenue. At such a low price, even a relatively poor wizard child can build up their own Gobble-Em Army. Goblin battles were very popular with wizard students during the summer that Augustus’s Candies had a direct import line to Hogwarts. Although the goblins are supposed to be eaten once defeated, some of the battles grew to be so big that pools of melted goblin began to show up in house common rooms and bedrooms, and a few sticky puddles even made their way into the restricted section of the library. Allegedly, Dumbledore thought this was very funny and declined to ban the treats. Some time later, the “Vanillers” faction was phased out in favor of the “Lemon Droppsers,” which sold much better.
FAERIE FISH (discontinued) were small packets of tough red gummy candy that superficially resembled fish eggs. When left alone in sugar water, they “hatch” and grow into living red gummy fish that have a strange berry-like flavor and a pleasant chewy consistency. They wriggle around in the water—a little less fluidly than real fish, but they’re always smiling.
Faerie Fish demoed poorly. Hungry wizard children prefer eating candy to investing in the possibility of candy and a guarantee of a soggy robe. Furthermore, there was a lot of up-front work and waiting to do that didn’t balance against the (nonetheless satisfying) payoff of snapping the little red fish out of the water and chomping down on them as they squirmed. Augustus’s Candies considered selling special fish that could lay more eggs, but that sounded too much like a scam: “Buy one pack of faerie fish eggs for a handful of sickles and start hatching a profit!” After Augustus cracked a joke about pyramid schemes seeming exactly in line with legendary fae trickery, he rejected the idea and discontinued Faerie Fish.
JELLY WEEPERS are another gummy candy. They look like a large, angular teardrop with a flavorful liquid center that gushes out when bitten, causing the chewer to immediately burst into tears. These are sold in packets of just one, with a prominent warning not to eat two at once, because each additional weeper causes liquid to burst from more places than just your eyes: first your nose (students who abuse weepers to invoke a crying fit see this as a bonus), then mouth, then… any other available places.
DOLLY’S OWN FIZZ GUMS are spongy candies that your teeth cut right through. They immediately fill your mouth with a fizzy flavored foam. Frankly, Fizz Gums are disgusting. The company has no idea why they sell so well, despite the branding that distances Fizz Gums from Augustus’s other treats.
PERSONIZED BALLOONS, one of Augustus’s few inedible offerings, are a combination of animated wizard photographs with muggle rubber balloons. Each balloon has been “personized” with a personality and face which both inflate as the balloon grows in size. Most are very friendly and mime encouragement: they feign weakness when small and crumpled; they make faces and puff up their cheeks as they are inflated; they smile and (silently) laugh as they float and bounce around. Personized balloons slightly lose their composure as they’re inflated to near-bursting, but not to an uncomfortable degree; at most a brief flicker of perhaps-feigned uncertainty as they get bigger and bigger, before continuing to encourage their playmates.
FOOD ROLL-UPS are small waxy paper squares with a shimmering spell cast on them that makes one side a little slippery. Place two, shiny side inwards, on either side of any foodstuff, tap your wand to one of them, and with a wobble and a zwoooop!, the food gets squished into a thin square of flat goo stuck firmly between the two pieces of paper. This magical sandwich can be rolled up, stored, sliced, etc. Most foods are flattened into a very thin square; extremely large foods (for example, an entire roasted goose) end up thicker and tough to roll. To undo the seal, peel off the same piece that touched the wand, and the squashed food in the middle bounces slightly as it re-inflates into its original shape. Roll-ups only slightly protect the temperature of the food—there’s no extra magic involved, just the natural consequence of less thermodynamic heat transference—but it’s much easier for a wizard to heat or cool something by magic, or just use an insulated lunch box, once the food is rolled into a convenient little tube.
Food Roll-Ups are very cheap and sell well when paired with cauldron cakes, coffin cookies (a generously proportioned chocolate soft cookie sandwich, in the shape of a coffin, with a white-cookie cross on the top, and the shallow inset in the lower cookie filled with a distinctive strawberry-cinnamon jam), pidgin pot pie (an American-style pot pie filled with gravy, assorted meats, and vegetables, where the meat and vegetable chunks magically resemble little living people or animals that swim in the gravy), and other large pastry-type foods that students may want to stock up on before the school year starts.
A food roll-up can be rolled up and stored, or it can be sliced or torn into smaller pieces, which also divides the food. On the Hogwarts Express, a cauldron cake can be squashed into a Food Roll-up, then very easily ripped into fairly equal parts to share among friends who haven’t mastered the esoteric and dangerous Divisio charm. Even if they know Divisio, which enchants one’s wand to cut through the first thing it’s placed on top of, it’s much easier and a lot less sticky to cut a convenient paper square instead of a syrup-covered cake. Divisio is not taught in schools except through special electives, as “the first thing it’s placed on top of” is non-exclusive, and often involves books, tables, robes, and fingers.
CHOCOLATE CONCEPTS dissolve under your tongue and allow you to viscerally imagine eating anything you can visualize that’s made of chocolate, like a lucid hallucination. Zero calories and won’t make you sick to your stomach, just sick of chocolate. Bummer.
LEMON DROPKICKS. Try and keep your balance once your legs go crazy after eating one of these.
AUSPICIOUS AUGUSTUS’S SWEET QUILLS (discontinued) are more or less the same as Honeyduke’s Sweet Quills: chew on the end during a tough exam for a refreshing sugar high. Augustus was especially proud of this product, certain he’d thought of it by himself until he received a letter from a first-year Hogwarts student comparing them unfavorably to Honeyduke’s. After staring hard into the corner of his office ceiling for a good few minutes, Augustus discontinued Auspicious Augustus’s Sweet Quills and mounted the letter on his office wall as a reminder of his own pride: however original one of his ideas might be, novelty only produces one sale. Flavor is what produces fan letters.
GOB STOPPERS are a kind of long-lasting, tough, chewy candy that comes in tins. Each tin is filled with a checkerboard flavor pattern of little squares of the stuff: chocolate and vanilla, strawberry and banana, whiskey and soda (for adults). While you’re chewing on a Gob Stopper it will absorb all the liquid in your mouth and keep it pleasantly dry, which is great for, er, all kinds of things.
SUGAR HAIR. Young witches who regularly chew on their hair during class are sure to fall in love with this sweet alternative. Just like Sugar Quills, Augustus designed this treat to corner the market on students who crave sugar in the library or lecture hall. Flavor varies by hair color: black is liquorice, dark brown is dark chocolate, light brown is milk chocolate, blonde is a wheaty citrus, and red is gingerbread, obviously.
ARTICULATE AUGUSTUS’S SPEAK-EASIES are small pastel-colored candies made of heavily compressed sugar powder that has been shaped into a kind of twirl, stacked together, and then wrapped up in a holographic cellophane wrapper. Each packet of about twenty-three candies is themed after one of a selection of difficult-to-pronounce common spells and charms taught in wizarding schools. The candies double as a study aid for these tricky incantations. After you eat one, you forcibly pronounce, with perfect intonation, the spell that the candy represents. For flavor, the candies are molded to a shape that matches the spell’s wand movement, and they have a consistent color and taste unique to each spell, although the candies themselves often fluctuate slightly in color.
For instance, take a packet of the Wingardium Leviosa Speak-Easies popular with first-year students. The candies are shaped like a sideways “2”, are colored varying shades of bony white lavender, and taste like plums mixed with sugar and chalk. After eating one, the next words you speak will be a perfect recital of Wingardium Leviosa.
In theory, a diligent student can use these to practice the mouth feeling of difficult charms to help develop oratory muscle memory. Realistically, however, lazy students tended to rely on these during exams—until the thoughtful headmaster of an American wizarding academy suggested giving the user an additional “tic” as a kind of proof of usage. His letter to Augustus suggested: winking; pronouncing “speak-easy” before the spell; creating a colored flash in the user’s mouth; or releasing a powerful scent that matched the flavor. Augustus’s decided that making the user wink as they spoke was an excellent and non-invasive modification, which actually resulted in two interesting phenomena once the change arrived at schools:
Firstly, teachers conducting exams occasionally broke down laughing as they watched students violently struggle to prevent themselves from winking after secretly swallowing a Speak-Easy during practical examinations. At least one poor old professor tittered himself senseless and had to be replaced by the assistant headmaster for a few hours.
Secondly, students who relied too much on Speak-Easies tended to wink as they cast the charm even without the candy. This obviously led to some bullying.
Augustus’s eventually modified the candies again to create a brief flash of colored light upon activation, which was much easier to see in a hall full of students than a wink was, and wasn’t as likely to cause any long-term bullying. Augustus’s sent a large package full of candies to the academy headmaster regardless as thanks for his ideas, although their letter “regretted” that they were totally unwilling to touch his final idea with a 13-inch wand1: deliberately faulty Unforgivable Speak-Easies.
Unforgivable Speak-Easies, as imagined by the helpful American headmaster, were Speak-Easies styled after the three Unforgivable Curses: Imperio, Crucio, and Avada Kedavra. The headmaster’s idea was that any dark wizard honestly trying to use these candies for practice would find them unforgivably incorrect: the intonation would be very, very, very slightly wrong. Additionally, perhaps using more than one would impart a very expensive, very secretive, very hard-to-break curse that would force the user to tend towards that intonation permanently, crippling their ability to use those spells. This was much more interesting and probably much more legal than making the user’s brain melt, and would prevent curious students from ever actually using the curses. Aside from the potential ethical, moral, financial, and legal ramifications, Augustus strongly doubted that Dark Wizards would be stupid enough to buy candy that openly advertised itself as an aid to maiming people, and declined any research into the idea.
ARGUABLY AUGUSTUS’S MINUTE APOTHECARY DROPS (discontinued) are small hard-packed balls of grimy goo that are essentially “potion starters.” Each one contains an easy-mix base and the foundational ingredients of various kinds of basic early-year potions. Stir one into a bubbling cauldron and your homework is done faster than you can say “Accio eye of newt.”
These were discontinued in response to Augustus hearing that the drops were used to cheat during potions exams. Minute Apothecary Drops are not candy and taste absolutely terrible; some students were using the drops to cheat during potions exams by hiding them in their mouths. These cheaters were easy to identify because they usually threw up into their cauldrons immediately afterwards, which certain cynical potions professors found extremely satisfying. After reflection, Augustus decided it was harmful to his brand to give his candies a cousin that tasted like the bottom of a cauldron which hadn’t been cleaned in seven years.
SLICED BEVERAGES (discontinued): Convenient, portable slices of many of your favorite drinks, including water, tea (with and without milk and sugar), and coffee (same). A second spell, aside from the one that solidifies the liquids, keeps dirt and grime off the slices, so you can throw a few slices of water in your robe pockets without needing to carry a bottle. These were discontinued because they didn’t sell very well to sugar-hungry students, and Augustus hated how they seemed to suck the very idea of fun out of his candy catalogue pages.
GUMMY SNITCHES: Fast-flying chocolate snitches—which these are not—have been around since Quiddich conquered the wizarding world of sports, but they don’t tend to sell very well. If you catch one with your teeth, either the wings snap off in your mouth and the rest of the chocolate falls to the ground, or your bite merely glances off the snitch’s big tasty chocolate body. If you try and grab a chocolate snitch with your hands, most of the chocolate ends up on your palms and fingers instead of in your mouth, since you practically have to crush it to catch it. Chocolate snitches flew out of the public eye and modifications have, so far, failed to score, so Augustus’s Candies created Slow-Flying Gummy Snitches.
Gummy Snitches glide around a meter-diameter spherical space centered on their cellophane wrapper (so don’t throw it away! The best thing to do is to put it in your robe pocket). Instead of thin, flickering foil-covered wings, the wings on the gummy snitches are thick, chewy caricatures that slowly flap as the snitch glides around its owner. The soft gummy texture makes it easy to nab with your teeth, it’s too big to accidentally swallow, and it won’t burst if you grab it really hard. You can even let the snitch go again if you like. Gummy snitches come in a variety of fun, sparkling flavors, like gold champagne, classic cola, and rainbow fruity fizz.
A few students like to keep their gummy snitch flying indefinitely as a sort of pseudo-familiar. Since the snitch will orbit its wrapper for up to ten minutes and can be magically “recharged” with a very basic charm, it’s possible to have a gummy snitch buzzing around you all the time. This, however, is not nearly as interesting as unwrapping a few dozen gummy snitches at once and stuffing the wrappers in your friend’s robe pockets when he’s not looking.
FLOO FLUFF: Frighten your friends and family when you eat some of this sparkling sugar powder instead of tossing it into the fireplace.
DECEASTICKY BUNS (discontinued) were an innovative piece of culinary-ectoplasmic research. Each of these tasty, sticky, cinnamon-flavored buns left behind a foggy little ghost bun hovering in the place it had “died” by being bitten into, impaled (with a fork) or cut for the first time. The remnant buns would fade away after a few days unless they were eaten by a real ghost, like the 87-year-old spirit of a young lady who lived in Augustus’s office chimney and whose history, thankfully, will not be recounted here2. She tested a bun that had died heroically on Augustus’s sideboard, and described it sadly as “quite tasteless, but a thoughtful gesture nonetheless.” After that, Augustus said he considered them a failure and discontinued the project.
GUMMY-GUM-GUM is chewing gum that will make your jaw hit the floor—if you chew the whole pack at once. Just one stick at a time will merely stretch your jaw down to the base of your neck as you chew. Gummy-Gum-Gum is colored bright pink and has a classic bright pink flavor. Yes, Augustus’s refuses to explain what the flavor really is. It’s just pink.
[REDACTED] are little strawberry and vanilla snack cakes with a cross motif. Eating one alters your voice and vocal profile for a few hours. Don’t ask why. Really, really, don’t ask. Augustus hates these and won’t explain why he can’t discontinue them. [REDACTED] are only available by special order and aren’t in the catalogues.
ALCHEMICAL AUGUSTUS’S COMBUSTABUBBLE GUM: This foul, black chewing gum that tastes of liquorice, coffee grounds, and soot became remarkably popular with alchemists, especially older students. Energizing and strong enough in flavor to overpower fouler fumes, it wasn’t meant to be used for bubbling, but the fact that even the tiniest bubble from this gum exploded with a sound like a dragon swallowing a combustion engine only made it more popular with the already-outcast alchemist students. As the number of blasts echoing through the halls of wizard universities increased, so too did alchemy enthusiasts grow to be even more reviled than they already were. They chewed with pride, and alchemy examinees were usually given whole buildings to themselves, often due to conveniently timed university holidays.
Augustus demoed a special variant of Combustabubble Gum with the same spell-ingredients as Gob Stoppers. They were designed to absorb dangerous alchemical and potion fumes, but test audiences agreed that they’d “rather inhale the inside of a wyvern’s wind pipe3 than one more whiff of that grease” and that it tasted “like dragon dung.” This was surprising because the soot-like flavor and combustive power of the original actually came from—actually, never mind.
OUR-GAS SODA POPS in Orange Cream, Root Beer, and Blue flavors, come fastened together in two cold little bottles joined at their caps in an hourglass shape. Snap the hourglass in half and you get two open bottles. One goes down ultra-fizzy but the bubbles disappear after drinking, and the other goes down smooth but is guaranteed to make the drinker belch horribly (or hilariously). These are meant to be shared between two drinkers: the bubbles magically move to the other drinker’s stomach. Alternatively, mixing the bottles and drinking will guarantee a fit of extreme belching an hour later that can be useful for many situations. This bonus feature completes a three-way naming pun (“our gas”, “hour glass”, and “hour gas”) that Augustus is very proud of, even though he doesn’t usually go in for prank treats.
APPARENTLY AUGUSTUS’S VERY MILD BEANS come in a beige box and are probably candy, but although the flavors—which include Waffle, Black Tea with Milk & Sugar, Dishonest Blueberry, Orange Pulp, Foreign Red Pastry Filling, Sweet Cucumber, and Maple Snow, among others—are sweet, they’re barely detectable to kids. The beans are all slightly off-white or barely-not-black, and have a fancy “A” written on them. These must be a treat for adults.