Soap Lily: We Make Do with What We Have

We really REALLY wanted to make soap Tuesday, but our supply orders still had not come in (see Economics post). What's a girl to do? We look around to see what we have on hand.

We searched for simple soap recipes hoping to find one with few ingredients. K found a great, gentle-sounding bar on the following Web site: http://www.soapqueen.com/bath-and-body-tutorials/cold-process-soap/baby-soap-buttermilk-bastille-baby-bar/. You can certainly click on that link and see exactly what it entails, but we took pictures along the way to share our experience with this recipe.

This Buttermilk Bastille Baby Bar is described as being gentle for babies and sensitive skin, but you HAVE to know your skin. My daughter (the one who helped make the lemongrass spearmint soap) has some severe allergies, so she would never be able to use this soap because of the buttermilk.

Bastille Baby Bar Recipe:

Olive Oil - 27 oz
Coconut Oil – 5 oz
Buttermilk – 8 oz
Carrot Baby Food – 2.5 oz (make sure it says just carrots and water)
Lye - 4.3 oz

I think it is called a Baby Bar partially because of its gentle properties, but also because it calls for baby food. It has been a while since there was baby food in either of our houses, so we made some using distilled water and organic carrots. Ahhh, flashbacks to the baby days!

K also just happened to have some buttermilk in her fridge. You would NEVER find that in A's house! Usually, when milk instead of water is mixed with lye, it is best to use it in a slushy-frozen state to keep it from getting too hot during the reaction with the lye. To chill our milk faster, we measured the needed amount and divided it among some of our abundant supply of yogurt cups (which we will wash and use again for something different), and put them in the freezer while we cooked and pureed the carrots.

While the milk continued to chill and the carrots cooled, K lined our mold with freezer paper so it would be ready for the soap.

Milk and carrots and mold at the ready, it was time to create the lye mixture. 1st, measure and mix together the carrots and the slushy buttermilk.

(by the way, while cleaning up afterwards, we noticed that the carrots had dyed the edges of our spatulas a yellow-ish, carroty orange)

Then we measured the lye before adding it to the mix.

The recipe suggested keeping the mixture in an ice bath to keep it from becoming too hot. We did this, but our mixture never got up to the temperature we usually see, so we switched it to a warm water bath to get the temperature up to at least 100 degrees F.

With the lye mixture combined, it was time to mix the oils and warm them to melt the coconut oil.

And now finally we can mix all of the ingredients and create the soap mixture! First add the lye mixture to the oils, then begin to mix using the stick blender.

The recipe warns that trace happens quickly. We did not find that to be the case, perhaps because our mixtures were not as warm as we expected. We kept mixing and eventually did reach a thin trace.

(perhaps you can see in the wake of the blender how the mixture is thicker now)

At this point, K felt rather strongly that the carrot orange color was just too orange, so we toned it down a bit by adding titanium dioxide. We used 1 T of rice bran oil and 1/2 tsp of titanium dioxide. We added 1 1/2 tsp of the white mixture to the soap in 1/2 tsp increments until it reached a color that K liked.

If we had added essential or fragrance oils, we would have done so at this point; however, we did not have any on hand that we felt would go well with the ingredients or the intent of a gentle baby bar, so we chose to leave this one in a more natural state without any added fragrances.

The following photos illustrate bringing the mixture to trace. We mixed for longer than we were expecting, but look at the difference through the progression of the pictures:

(Notice the trail on the surface? Finally, we reached trace!)

Time to pour it into the mold. The recipe did not mention insulating the mold, but we did it anyway for 24 hours. It also did not mention misting the surface with alcohol, but we did that as well to prevent any ashy buildup from forming.