Pink Peppermint Patties, and more!

Sage & Citrus, Cafe L'Orange, and Pink Peppermint Patty

Get ready for a LONG blog entry...


Thursday, November 6, 2014

This afternoon I will ditch Alison so hubby and I can assist in a babysitting and tree cutting operation at our son's home in the wilds of Western SC.  Alison assures me she will be fine, and I know she will, probably enjoying the peace and quiet.  Besides, she wants to create a coffee soap, and since I'm not a coffee drinker, I would have nothing valuable to add to that mix.

As I was planning on leaving midday we got an early start.  We decided on a double batch of Old Faithful using the cold process method. I will do Sage and Citrus  and Alison will be making a batch of Peppermint and Chocolate scented soap. Yum! The ingredients smell so good.

The peppermint scent is a EO from +Lebermuth Co, the pink color is a combination of Rose Clay from +Natures Garden, and Blushed Pink Mica from www.rusticescentuals.com.

The Chocolate FO is a small sample we got from +Bramble Berry.  For a chocolaty color and additional chocolate scent, Alison mixed cocoa powder into melted Cocoa Butter.

Here is the cocoa mixed in the melted cocoa butter along side the FO.

Alison divided her half of the batter into two measuring cups, she added the pink peppermint color and EO to one and the chocolate color and FO to the other.

Here is the chocolate color & FO mixed into the batter; it smells just like chocolate cake batter.

And the pink batter mixed with the Peppermint EO.

Alison added a layer of Chocolate, then Peppermint, repeating three times.

The final layer was Chocolate that she swirled on top of the last Peppermint layer.

Here is the finished Chocolate Peppermint Soap.

Now it will cure for 24 hours before we can take it out of the mold and cut it into bars.

Alison sprinkled a light dusting of Blush Pink Mica on top.

Wish you could smell this soap, it makes your mouth water...for a Peppermint Patty!

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Now on the the batch that Kathy made...

I chose Sage and Citrus from +Natures Garden for two reasons, first I have a granddaughter named Sage, so of course I am partial to that name, but second, this stuff smells great, so fresh and clean.

My colors included TD from +Bramble Berry mixed with Diamond Dust Mica from +NaturesGarden (to give it sparkle); Aqua Pearl Mica, again from +Bramble Berry;  

and from +Rustic Escentuals I used Cornflower Celebration Mica. But, that's not all. 

I also tried a sample we had gotten from Rustic Escentuals called Denim Strut Mica. The color is an incredibly pretty blue.

Here are the colors, I used 1/2 tsp. of colorant for each one, all were mixed in 1 TBSP of O/O (soap slang for Olive Oil).

I poured portions of the batter right into the color bowls. 

then had an OH NO moment when I realized I had forgotten to add my scent!  

OH NO.....

All I could do was add a bit of the FO to each color and to the batter left in the mixing bowl.

Unfortunately I didn't add the FO very evenly and wound up with too much in the Aqua Pearl.  

How did I know you might ask....it started to seize (harden).  

I tried adding some of the uncolored batter, but it didn't help much.  

I had no idea how the soap would turn out but at that point could do nothing

but finish what I had started and wait to see what would come out of the mold.

Even with the Aqua Pearl color getting tough to pour, I continued layering the colors with non colored batter. I believe I had two layers of each.

Here is the last layer of colored batter. The white with minimal FO was easy to pour, not so the Aqua Pearl; it was getting stiffer by the second.

Above, you can see where I added the final layer of non colored batter, then I did a quick hanger swirl.

I topped off the soap with all four colors of the remaining batter.

And last but not least a pretty swirl on the top.

It smells really nice. At that point I was hopeful that the Aqua Pearl's seizing wouldn't be a problem but knew I would have to wait to find out.

24 hours later, the wait was over! Following are pictures of the Sage and Citrus.

Taken right before we unmolded.

The Aqua Pearl's seizing didn't hurt the soap a bit; it almost looks like we planned it.....

And you thought we were finished, 

but wait....there's more!

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After Kathy left Alison whipped up a batch of Cafe L'Orange, and here she tells how.

I have been wanting to try a coffee soap for a while now, so I finally dove in and did it. After comparing a few different recipes, I came up with one that I think will be really wonderful to use.  

I usually run recipes through soapcalc.net's lye calculator.  I really like the recipe result that I get from that site.  It gives a breakdown of the expected qualities of my recipes from hardness, to cleansing, to lather and bubbles.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to get to the site for several weeks now.  

I did want to double-check my water and lye amounts, though, so I ran my recipe through two different lye calculators.  One was through Majestic Mountain Sage, and the other was the lye calculator on soapguild.org.  Both results were right in line with each other, and were proportionally in line with the Old Faithful recipe Kathy and I frequently use, so I felt ready to go with my new recipe.

I used a combination of Castor oil, avocado oil, grapeseed oil, cocoa butter, coconut oil, and olive oil to make this soap.

Before I started measuring oils, I got my lye mixture ready so it could be cooling.  

I replaced the plain distilled water in this recipe with really strong brewed coffee 

that I had let completely cool.  

It is very important to be sure that the liquid for the lye mixture is cool.  Warm water and lye are not a good combination.  Kathy and I learned that from experience a month or more ago when we didn't want to wait on some tea to cool completely,  Seriously, be sure the liquid is cool.

And, by the way, if you've never made coffee soap before and want to try it, don't be surprised if the smell of the lye mixture is not as pleasing as good hot coffee.  It is definitely not, but be patient, the chemical process doesn't last forever, and a mild coffee smell will come back into the soap.

I wanted to include coffee grounds into the soap for 

scrubbing power and exfoliation.  Also, I thought it would 

look pretty.

I didn't want the grounds to be too rough, though, so I 

ran them through the grinder to make them as fine as possible.  These particular 

grounds are Dunkin' DonutsChocolate Mint coffee.  (In case you couldn't tell from 

the soapI made this morning, I LOVE chocolate mint!)  I don't expect any of the 

chocolate mint scent to actually come through in the soap; I just like the idea that it is there.

This is the coffee/lye mixture after it has been cooling for a while.

For fragrance I used Orange Valencia Essential Oil from +Lebermuth Co .

Why orange?  

I used to have a friend who lived in Asheville NC, and I would visit as often as I could. Every time I visited, we would go to Fresh Market and I would get coffee to take back home.  One of my favorites was Cafe L'Orange, so I decided to fashion my coffee soap after the coffee that I loved so much.

Above you can see the mixed oils in the bucket, the coffee/lye in the bowl, the 

essential oil on the scale, and the coffee grounds in the tiny bowl in the upper left.  

I did not use silk or any colorant for this soap.  The colors are completely 

courtesy of the coffee and the essential oil.

Adding the coffee/lye to the oils

This is how it looked just before I started mixing.

I used the stick blender and mixed until I had an even color.

When the mixture reached light trace,

I added the coffee grounds.  It was 1 TBSP of coffee before I ran it back through the grinder.  I didn't measure it again after re-grinding; I just dumped it all in.

Once I had the grounds mixed in evenly, I added the EO.  See the orange color 

around the inside of the bucket just above the batter line?  That is from the EO.  

I used the spatula to scrape it down and made sure all of it was evenly mixed 

into and throughout the soap batter.

I poured the batter into the mold and smoothed out the surface.

I also tamped the mold down on the countertop several times to eliminate

as many air bubbles as possible.

Then I inserted the dividers, put the lid on the mold, and placed it into the 

curing room with the two soaps we had made this morning.  We'll see on 

Friday how today's work turned out.

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Friday, November 7, 2014

I tried to unmold the Cafe L'Orange soap early this afternoon, but it was still a bit too soft to take out of the mold.

The bars are really pretty (in the foreground is a soap ball that I made from the scraps that had stuck to the side of the divider).

  I got three bars out of the mold, and the fourth started to squish a little bit in my hand.  I did not want to do anything to mess up my Cafe L'Orange, so I put the rest of them back into the mold and back into the curing room.  We'll try again in a day or so.

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We let the soap cure over the weekend, giving it three full days to harden.  

Monday morning we unmolded, and not only does it smell exactly the way 

Alison wanted it to, it looks great too.

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Now it's Monday and we have pictures of all three of the soaps we did on Friday, all of them turned out well, and all have completely different scents. 

 L to R

Sage and Citrus, Cafe L'Orange, and Pink Peppermint Patty.