Monday September 8, 2014
Truth. Alison has a serious issue. It's an addiction to all things pumpkin. Whether it be candles, soap, cookies, pie, ice cream, she loves it, so it was a foregone conclusion that we would, at some point, be making pumpkin soap. It helps that pumpkin contains healthy fruit enzymes, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals.
Today was the day! We actually doubled up and while Alison was making the HP Pumpkin soap, Kathy made a batch of CP soap called Oakmoss (you can read about it in the blog titled "Our Oakmoss can't be used as camo, it smells too good").
But this blog is about pumpkin, actually 100% pumpkin right from the can! What we don't use can be made into, umm - pumpkin bread, cookies, pie etc etc.
We only used 6 ounces of this pumpkin in the soap, so happily Alison whipped up a batch of yummy pumpkin bread last night (we are finishing the blog on Tuesday as well as the bread).
The scent she used is Pumpkin Spiced from www.fragrancebuddy.com. Their description of the scent states "smells just like fresh pumpkin combined with cinnamon and spices, a nice warm and inviting fragrance." They aren't kidding!
We are using some super olein palm oil in this batch. It's color is a dark orange, so we think it will make a nice color for a pumpkin soap. The other oils we are using are Olive, palm, coconut and castor which is our usual mixture.
We don't have a picture of the silk, but we finely cut about 1 ounce and added it to the lye/water mixture. In this picture the lye/silk/water is being added to the melted oils that are in the crock pot.
Here is the pumpkin. Pretty isn't it? We wish you could smell it! Now this may look like more than six ounces, but it's not; we measured exactly because this is scientific and every ingredient has to balance.
Alison is beginning to stick blend the mixture of oils and lye/silk/water. You can see emulsification beginning as the batter begins to lighten.
At this point the batter is fully mixed, it has lightened up to a nice light orange, this makes us very happy.
In goes the pumpkin.
After Alison blended the pumpkin into the batter, we loved the color even more. It's now a rich orange color, quite pretty.
The addition of the pumpkin caused the batter to thicken a bit faster and we were at medium trace almost immediately.
Time to cook the soap!
We check the soap in 15 minute increments.
The first time we checked we noticed that it had begun to gel around the sides, the batter is very stiff.
We discovered that the batter was so stiff we had to use a stainless steel spoon to stir it, the spatchula wasn't strong enough.
Once it was stirred it looked pretty gloppy, we weren't worried though, we put the lid back on and let it cook for another 15 minutes.
We checked and discovered the mixture had seriously separated, leaving about a half an inch of clear liquid on the top.
Since we've never made soap with pumpkin before, we were flying blind, but once we stirred the separated batter, this is what it looked like (above). We did say a few prayers at this point.
Finally after the soap had cooked for about one and a half hours we began to be hopefully optimistic. This batter was starting to look like "normal" soap batter!
We love the color.
Next time we checked we found the sides bubbling up, it didn't volcano, but did do some serious cooking.
This soap took longer to cook than our usual soaps, and Alison ran out of time. She had to leave so Kathy finished up the soap (much to Alison's disappointment! She really wanted to see the whole process). After about three hours total cooking time, numerous PH test strips, and at least three zap tests (no zap), Kathy declared the soap done.
She checked the temperature as the flash point of our scent is 200 degrees, and she was happy to see that the batter was well below that.
She added the fragrance oil. It was almost a greenish color, but it did not affect the lovely orange color of the soap; it did, however, boost the pumpkin scent right into the stratosphere. Kathy's mouth was watering it smelled so good!
Alison's plan for the soap was to remove several cups of the batter and lighten it with titanium dioxide, then swirl the lighter batter back into the darker batter for a two toned soap. The picture above is several cups of batter with the TD mixed in. Notice it's much lighter.
Here the soap as Kathy is plopping it into the 18 bar mold.
In this picture you can see the darker soap batter beneath the lighter (TD added) dollops on the top.
Kathy spoon-swirled (folded) the lighter and darker batters together then did a little swirl action on the top.
She inserted the dividers and sat the soap aside to cure overnight.
Next it was time for clean up.
Noticed right away what a great lather this soap has, this was from a few pieces scraped off the side of the measuring cup.
This is just soap batter, no dish detergent. LOTS of bubbles, and it all smells so good.
Here is the soap right out of the mold. The picture was taken inside so the soap looks a little darker than it really is. No question about the scent, pumpkin all the way!
And here is the finished product - Pumpkin Spiced soap.
It honestly looks and smells good enough to eat!
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