Found a recipe for chocolate soap. Who can resist? Came out chocolate-colored, had to score the top like a Hershey bar (yes, totally trite). It smelled great at first, but now — two weeks later — the smell has dissipated. Perhaps it will come back when used.
***Update. I don’t like this at all. The soap lathers up fine, but has a thin, stingy feel to it, and it doesn’t smell at all. And let’s face it, what’s the point of making my own soap if it doesn’t smell good?
Say goodbye to my high moral ground and the assertion that I will only use pure essential oils. Yep, that’s right, I’ve succumbed to the lure of fragrance oils (FO to those in the know). To celebrate my newfound olfactory freedom, I found a more fussy recipe:
3 oz coil
2 oz sweet almond oil
2 oz oo
3 oz palm
4 oz crisco
2 oz cocoa butter
61 g? lye
6 oz water
And the FO? 1/2 oz Flowerbomb (type) FO
It smells great.
***Update: I’m not crazy about what I did to the soap (acrubbies, color), but te actual soap itself is beyond heavenly. It’s very silky.
16 oz oo
1 oz beeswax
1 oz palm oil
61 g lye
1 TB poppyseed and 2 TB of litsea cubeba added to trace
I unmolded this WAY too soon, and it was a soggy mess. Four days later, however, it’s hardening up quite nicely.
Although I’ve been lax in posting, I’ve found an all new one-pound wonder — and it fits perfectly into microwave-safe Chinese takeout boxes for molding. When done, simply unpeel the sides and slice. There’s a slight slant to the edges, but who cares? Not I — especially if it means not fussing with waxed paper and stuff.
The recipe is:
126 g oo
126 g palm
108 coil/pko
4.5 oz water
51 g lye (coil) / 50 g lye (pko)
Using this recipe, I’ve made a lovely carrot soap, replacing the water with carrot juice (half added to lye, half when mixing all ingredients) and adding cardamom and ginger essential oils.
Nicki gave us grapes from her garden before we left for Canada. There was no way we could eat them all, so I mushed them up and used the juice the same way. It was really cool; when I added the lye it hissed and fizzed, and turned a deep brown color. Alas, the soap itself crumbled when it came out of the mold. I think the sugar content was way too high.
The lavender batch turned out just fine.
Last night, I modified one pound wonder by replacing the oo with half almond oil and half safflower. Scented with a blackberry rose (dyptique type) FO, and added red sandalwood powder to the lye to make it purple.
I was going to do a long, involved step-by-step recap of our week-long trip to British Columbia, but I’ve lost my steam. The short version is that we spent two days in Victoria, 2 days in Tofino, a day sightseeing our way to just north of Vancouver, and a day and a half along the coast up there. It was great; we fell in love with Tofino and the whale-watching tour, thought Butchart Gardens was WAY overrated, and discovered the mining musum, which rocks (literally). One of the highlights, though, was camping outside Port Alberni along a stream where the salmon were migrating in DROVES.
I am so disappointed with this beer soap, made with the pretty awful beer Steve made last year. But I’ll post the recipe anyway, in case anyone out there wants to smell like a frat party.
12 oz flat beer
4 1.4 oz lye
9 oz oo
9 oz palm kernal
14 oz Crisco
2 tsp sandalwood powder
1/4 oz cypress eo
Sprinkled more sandalwood powder and ground nutmeg on the top.
Steve is going back to work on October 1 — even though he says he’s not ready. Actually, what he says is, “I just want to be unemployed and you can be my sugar mama.”
Which would be fine with me — as long as he had dinner ready every night and was wearing something sexy when I got home. Oh wait, I work from home.
In any case, we’re going on a hurrah trip on Monday: British Columbia. Neither of us has ever visited our friendly neighbors up north, so we’re looking forward to the trip. But of course, it means that I’m in a rush trying to wrap stuff up.
This is what Geoff asked when he walked into the kitchen yesterday evening. It was the 1/2 oz of amber I melted into my oils. When I was at Zenith, I couldn’t resist picking up a packet of the stuff. Then, I couldn’t resist the idea of amber-scented soap. Would I add the powdered stuff at trace? Hmm … I googled it, and found a single reference to someone melting it into the oils. And granted, it’s not natural because it’s extracted with petroleum or some such stuff, but hey, I never said I was completely organic.
So, aside from the amber:
201 g lye
21 oz oo
16 oz coil
14 oz palm (YAY!)
19 oz water
I decided to add essential oils too: a combo of 10 tsp (yes, ten, the scents are disappearing!)
2 cedarwood
2 vetiver
2 ylang ylang
3 ginger
1 palmarosa
Unmolded and cut this evening. Very, very oily. Freaked out a little because Cavitch says not to use soap that has oil on top and very hard soap. The soap was pretty soft too, though, which makes me think that the lye discount — which started at 10% — was really very high with the amber and eo additions.
But I think this is the piece de resistance thus far. There is only the slightest tang of ginger and vetiver — no trace of the others — but the amber shines through it all. The overall smell is muted, but still rich and almost humus-y. I hope it doesn’t fade any more. If I have time tomorrow, I may just run back up to Zenith and get some orris root.
*** Update.
This has darkened to a deep rich brown, and is WONDERFUL. I am renaming it 60s Porn Star. The copy? “Pre-silicone, bush-friendly, and love-handle loving — seems like it was a lot easier to feel good about yourself back then. Go ahead, jiggle around in the shower with 60s Porn Star’s rich amber redolence and ginger zip. This is definitely one bar that makes you want to get naked — and stay that way for days on end. And if you want to get in front of a camera? Well, that’s your business.”
Then it was time to try a shampoo bar. I trekked up to Zenith Supplies, bought lots of goodies including the requisite sunflower oil (which, strangely enough, hasn’t been in ANY of the stores down here in the wilds of South Seattle), and then realized that Whole Foods a block away had it for half the price. Oh well, I bought palm oil too. FINALLY. And lots of other stuff too. This hobby may bankrupt me.
Found a recipe for a shampoo bar (scroll down the page until you find Barbara’s Shampoo Bar). It calls for chamomile tea, which is much better for blonde hair. I replaced with nettle, which is supposed to help with dandruff. (I get really bad sebhorreic dermatitis.) Then I chopped the recipe in half (carefully running it through a trusty lye calculator, of course). So:
10 oz sunflower
3 oz coil
2 oz castor
2 oz lye
5.5 oz very strong nettle tea with two sugars
Went heavy on the essential oils: 3 tsp lavender, 3 rosemary. Come to think of it, that’s a tablespoon each, isn’t it?
She advised not to use the stick blender because it traced quickly. So I started beating. And beating. And beating.
I gave up and finished it up with the stick blender. Into another tupperware bowl mold, out the next day, chopped into chunks. Very oily, with lots of air bubbles. I examined carefully; it’s just cosmetic from the uneven stirring. It’s sitting on my office window sill, scenting up the air. I can’t wait to try it out.
***Update: This is great. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now. I still use a little conditioner, but not the gobs I’m used to. Pretty impressive.
