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.
