Farewell to Our Crock Pot (8-14-14)

Thursday August 14, 2014

Today we said goodbye to a trusty utensil, Kathy's old crock pot.  We don't want to dump on the crock pot, after all it serviced Kathy's family for over 30 years. In all honesty her family really didn't use it that often.  Everything has a lifespan though, and evidently the crock pot fulfilled its yesterday.  We think the thermostat went nuts, or stopped working, malfunctioned...bottom line, whatever wasn't working resulted in extremely high temperatures, which resulted a batch of severely OVER COOKED soap.  

All is not lost though. We will grate the batch up, re-make it, and document the batch's re-creation.  

We do have a replacement crock pot that we used today, and it worked flawlessly!  

Where are the pictures you ask?  We have a few still shots for you, but we are getting adventurous and trying the video approach again.  Unfortunately editing our l-o-n-g film takes a l-o-n-g time and it's not ready quite yet.  We will eventually post it to YouTube and put a link here so you can watch it.

Here is what we have so far with still pictures.  Remember this is a continuation of yesterday's post.

We left you with this, as some called it sushi rice cake! (we wish).

Today we started cutting the loaf into chunks small enough to fit 
through the feeder tube of a Cuisinart.

We honestly wish you could smell this; it really is amazing,.  Whoever created the name Amazingly Grace for this fragrance oil definitely knew what they were talking about.

View in the bowl of the Cuisinart. Kind of looks like cheese. Doesn't smell like cheese!

We are putting the grated soap into a large turkey roasting bag, it is perfect for re-batching as it can withstand high temperatures. We will use it as a boil-in-bag when we 

reheat the soap in a couple of days.

What a mess! We had soap chips all over the place. It was so overcooked that it just crumbled; we probably could have broken it up by hand. 

This is what we wound up with when we finished, a bag of soap flakes.  

Some people say you can mix Borax, washing soda, baking soda and grated Fels-Naptha or Ivory soap bars and make laundry detergent.  In this case if we were making laundry soap, we would use our grated amazingly grace; however, this time we will stick to re-batching the soap and save making laundry soap for later.

Since we are editing a video of today's soap creation, we don't have much else to show you except what our finished replacement batch looked like when cut.  (Yes it's actually Friday as I write this and we have cut the first special order soap, you know, the batch that replaced the overcooked batch).

These bars won't be sold publicly, as they are part of a special order.

They are scented with Ocean Mist and colored with aqua pearl mica and TD.

We bought a soap stamp, and we are stamping these bars with a corporate logo. It is really kind of neat.  In fact, we like it so much that we are thinking about getting a Soap Lily stamp.