The Sweetness Hidden in the Draught of Euphoria

Cedric had agreed readily enough, but to be honest, he had never tried turning a potion into candy before.

Still, he was eager to give it a shot.

The reason was simple. Every dish he had made so far had relied on a single special ingredient to do all the work. There were no side ingredients, and his seasonings were ordinary store-bought stuff.

That had always bothered Cedric.

For a special dish to be truly perfect, the main ingredient, the sides, and the seasonings should all be special materials.

But throwing several special materials into one pot would be troublesome and expensive. He did not have the experience, either...

The closest thing Cedric could think of was Potions.

Everyone knew potions were concoctions brewed from all sorts of strange ingredients to produce special effects. They worked much like his dishes.

Potions might not count as food, but Cedric thought their method of combining different special materials was well worth studying.

So, before he had even set foot in Hogwarts, he had privately decided that Potions would be the subject he devoted himself to for the next seven years.

Making candy was a fiddly business, but Cedric did not need to produce a finished sweet. He only had to give Hawke a candy recipe that would let him mix in the Draught of Euphoria.

That made things much easier. He did not even need to enter the kitchen or prepare ingredients. He just had to taste the Draught of Euphoria Hawke had brought, then use God's Hand's precise grasp of flavor to devise a suitable recipe.

Inside his room, Cedric shut the door, sat down at his desk, and unscrewed the bottle of Draught of Euphoria.

It had a sharp fragrance that made his mind snap to attention with a single sniff.

One small sip could make him feel good from head to toe, sweeping away almost any discomfort that was not caused by illness. Professor McGonagall had given him some when Apparition had left him feeling sick.

But he had heard that drinking too much caused problems. It could make people want to sing uncontrollably—or tweak noses, which was such a bizarre impulse that he could not fathom it.

Cedric eyed the pale golden liquid in the bottle and took a tiny sip.

Cheer bubbled up on its own. He felt as if warm sunlight had wrapped around him, and his throat itched to belt out a tune...

"Hm?" Cedric frowned and opened his eyes.

The urge to sing was there, but he could still suppress it. If he took a few more sips, though, he was not sure he could keep it under control.

That side effect was potent. Yet when he had drunk the Draught of Euphoria Professor McGonagall gave him, it had not hit this hard. In fact, he had not wanted to sing at all.

Cedric soon figured it out. Professor McGonagall's Draught of Euphoria probably had not been the ordinary kind sold on the market. Most likely, Professor Snape—the self-proclaimed Half-Blood Prince—had brewed it himself.

That Potions professor had revised quite a few recipes in Advanced Potion-Making, and the Draught of Euphoria was one of them.

"But I'm not here to change what the potion does. I'm here to change how it tastes." Cedric rubbed his chin.

An improvement to a potion used as widely as the Draught of Euphoria could bring enormous returns. But Cedric did not want to gamble on whether Professor Snape had patented his version. He could end up in a mess and attract Snape's attention to boot.

Cedric did not know much about improving potions without seeing Snape's method first. But when it came to flavor, even ten Snapes put together could not match him.

After just one sip of the Draught of Euphoria, Cedric had already built a tower of flavor for it in his mind.

It was a mental model. In his imagination, the potion's flavor was like a battered, uneven building, with nothing particularly tasty about it.

His job was to fill that tower with the right ingredients and build a fortress of flavor without a weak point.

"The texture should be hard candy. That'll control how long the Draught of Euphoria stays in the mouth."

"As for flavor, even without a speck of added sugar, the potion feels cloying. I need something to cut through that."

"Lemon's a must, but it won't be enough on its own. It can't overcome the potion's strange sweetness."

"Then..."

Cedric pulled out a sheet of white paper and began scribbling on it, adding ingredients one by one and testing how they fit into his imagined tower of Draught of Euphoria flavor.

"Something bitter... Cocoa? No, cocoa might interfere with the potion's effects. That could cause trouble. A little pepper? Or star anise and cinnamon, for a Turkish-style flavor?"

He kept at it all night.

Ideas came one after another, and he rejected them one by one. By the time he had crossed out nearly every ingredient he could think of, daylight had filled the room. The instant sunlight struck Cedric's face, a thought flashed through his mind.

"Why not use Snape's approach to revising the recipe on the candy instead? Put the revised ingredients in the candy, not the potion?"