The Soap Bubble

Boat Soap

Soap made for use on boats. Its 50% olive oil to create a mild moisturising effect for sore or chapped hands. There’s a good portion of coconut oil and some added coconut milk powder to the top and bottom parts, to create a good lather even in salt water. I used lard instead of palm oil to make the bar hard once its cured for some time. 

I didn’t realise how orange the coconut milk powder would make the top and bottom layers! I thought that not using fresh milk would make the colour less bright and… orangey. Apparently not :). I hope that while it cures it heads to a more caramelly colour than it is now. The milk powder seems to have made that portion of the soap softer too, since the white part in the middle is nice and hard.

There’s a subtle vanilla scent to the soap, but the only real smell comes from the coconut milk powder. Its kind of sweet and the two compliment each other nicely. Hopefully once its cured it won’t leave a clinging scent to the hands. Not very manly to smell of sweet vanilla :D. 

Overall I’m pleased. It stayed too soft to cut for about a week, but when I did slice it the effects were nice and smooth. Perhaps that’s what I need to do with my other soap recipe too. 

Millionaires Soap Revisted

It was finally time to take the millionaires soap for a test drive yesterday :D. Its come up lovely and hard now its finished curing. It smells good too, which I’m pleased about. It lathers nicely but it does make tan bubbles - I think that might be the carob powder I used to colour it.

When your lathering away there’s a nice sweet smell, but it doesn’t leave any clinging to your hands so it might as well be scent free. It finishes nice and cleanly, but not harshly. I like it, I’ll be trying it again without the poppy seeds. 

Pear Drop Lipbalm

In my last order from Soaposh, I got some fantastic pear drop flavour oil and I could wait to try it out on something :D. I tried a new recipe for these, and the consistency is so much better than the chocolate ones. There’s no comparison, its smooth and light and goes on loverly. Plus with 50 drops of oil it tastes good too.

The balms were coloured with beetroot powder to give a sort of peardrop kind of pink. Plus it sweetens the mix nicely. They have quite a mixed blend of oils, and the batch was larger than anticipated… But they came out so good I didn’t mind ;). 

Cucumber Soap

Crumbly crumbly cucumber soap. Damnit. I think it must be this recipe, or else I’m slicing them too soon… I don’t know. But it looks very strange since none of the surface is smooth save the end bits. I’m hoping once its cured for a bit the surface with smooth down… somehow. Well anyway, it smells really nice.

Tea Soap

Man this batch is an absolute pain. I made it with a mix of green tea and PG tips which I steeped overnight and then chilled for a couple of days. I drained off all the tea leaves and made up the liquid quantity with distilled water. 

It traced REALLY fast, so I added back the tea leaves and a tiny bit of green tea fragrance quick. Blitz blitz blitz and into the mould. Still, it got hot but not solid at all… 24 hours later and I tipped it into a bowl, still mostly liquid. It was half hard with a big old lump of goo in the middle, and it reeked of lye water. I concluded a lack of proper mixing was probably to blame, and blasted it in the microwave for ten minutes, a minute at a time. Once it was a goopey liquid again I started blending.

20 minutes of blending later and I decide it was probably all mixed XD. Rather dispairingly I put it back in the loaf mould and left it to set for two more days… Then I turned it out and low and behold… Half of it stayed behind. The part the air could get to had hardened up, but the stuff in the bottom was still squidgy. I used the spatula to scoop it onto the half that came out okay, and smoothed it on. The whole mix seemed to be the same, and the lye water smell was gone. Anyway, it looks like malt loaf now because I ‘iced’ it on. I added some salt crystals to the top, partly to make it look pretty and partly in the hope it would draw out some moisture.

It sliced beautifully, and now its exposed to the air on all sides its started to harden up properly. I’m not sure the scent is coming through good though. All in all far too much work for one batch of very brown soap!

Mini Duckies

Same as before; these worked so well I made another couple of batches since I’m already getting requests to take them home. My partner loves them, since they don’t make his skin itch or burn which is something of a miracle. He has very, very sensitive skin. 

These are small sample sized ones for people to take away and try. I wanted to be able to give a small, but cute amount to friends and get their feedback on the product.

Hot Chocolate Soap

Another botch job sadly, although I think the end result seems to be alright. Me and my partner joined forces to make Battenberg soap, but unfortunately the inside pieces were too uneven, and for some reason the soap was brittle when I sliced it. Next time I’m letting him do all the trimming!

Once it started to fall apart, I separated the three different parts again by hand; the pink centre squares, the yellow centre squares and the peach coloured ‘icing’ from the outside. I roughly chopped the the parts of the inner squares, which were scented with birthday cake and creme brullee already. The peach part I remelted and added a bit too much bourneville powder too, and layered the chunks with the chocolate soap in the load mould. It smells wonderful, a blend of cake, cream and cocoa. 

We think the chunks look like pink and white marshmellows, and there’s a drizzle of cocoa over the top. Good things came out of this mess :).

Moulds ~ You Get What You Pay For!

Yeah, I ordered a bunch of heat formed plastic moulds to start out with, basic shapes like the squares and four on one. This one has been used one whole time before now, and look at how deformed it is already. The square moulds I wanted for my eraser soaps are terrible; the thing won’t stay flat on the table and the layers are actually skewed to one side. Those have been scrapped. 

Cheap silicone loaf moulds as well. The shape of the mould needs support that the silicone shape alone won’t provide. The specialised one I use has silicone pillar supports running up both sides, which means its holds its shape perfectly, but is still flexible enough to cleanly pop out the loaf. Don’t waste your money on a cheap cooking loaf mould - the shape will sag and the loaf will be uneven. Go for one made specially for soap, even if it is more expensive. It will last you better in the long run.

So far I’ve never been able to cleanly remove cold process soap from even my good plastic moulds either. I’ve just invested in expensive but hard wearing silicone ones instead. It IS expensive, but if you want to make soap that removes cleanly, has a good shape and smooth lines then it seems to be the way to go.  

Collectable Iwako Eraser Soaps ~ Strawberry Cream

These little soaps have collectable Japanese erasers embedded between the layers. The erasers are lead and toxin free; once the soap is used up the eraser will survive intact. Sadly they are rather expensive little toys, but they do look very cute.

Only the one with the pink ice lolly came out exactly as I’d planned; The eraser is clearly visible and the layers are seperate. The piggy doesn’t have enough clear soap before his first pearl layer, so you can only see half of him. The layers have bled around the icecream cone, but it has created an awesome halo effect. The cake has some layer bleed too, although its limited to the edges. I got too excited and poured too soon. I like how they’ve come out just the same; each one is as unique as its little toy. 

The layers are scented with strawberry and creme brulee from bathbombiz, I figured it matched their pink colour nicely. I cannot believe how much pink I’ve worked with so far. I need to branch out, I hate pink XD. Next up is chocolate!

Golden Fishes

Same as before; these worked so well I made another couple of batches since I’m already getting requests to take them home. My partner loves them, since they don’t make his skin itch or burn which is something of a miracle. He has very, very sensitive skin.