i may be getting the hang of this

i haven't been so good about keeping up, but hey, no one is reading anyway. this is more for me to keep my thoughts straight and hopefully document a bit of this soap stuff.

for mother's day, i thought i'd make my mom something custom. she's always in the garden, so she's always 1) covered in bug bites and 2) always has dirty hands. hands in the dirt is the only way to garden. you have to feel the dirt. but it's not so nice on the hands. so i made an ultra moisturizing soap with corn meal to really scrub off that dirt without leaving her hands dried out. i also wanted to play with a bit of color using greens with a bit of red. this is what came out of the bunch:

pretty good! did make a mistake though. i dumped the green oxide into the soap before i took any out for the red. so i mixed the brick red oxide with a bit of oil and added it after i poured the green into the molds. the first few days out of the mold, they leaked oil, but now they look pretty cool! the red has stayed put, and kind of carved out some neat swirls.

the next week, i felt the itch again! plus, i found some delicious smelling coconut oil at the farmers' market that i just had to try. so i invited my neighbor over to make soap while our boys were making beer. first, we made my recipe for white chocolate truffle soap. it has lots of cocoa butter, so it smells just heavenly. and instead of using almond essential oil to keep it white, we went with vanilla bean and just a dash of cinnamon. mmmmmmmm-MMMMMMM! it smells so good. and i think it will darken to a nice milk chocolate color, so the scent and colors should be right on. here it is right after cutting:

and here it is 6 weeks later:

didn't even see that crescent shape on the bottom until i was editing the pictures. weird. but using it is a dream. nice and hard, *great* lather, and my skin feels amazing after using it. definitely will keep this recipe around.

since the batch was going so well, we decided to go for another one...cupcakes! or more specifically, lemon poppyseed cupcakes. i saw a cute tutorial on cupcake soap on the soap queen's blog. i'm into more natural colors and fragrances, so i thought lemon poppyseed was a nice alternative to strawberry cheesecake. but i do love those bright pink colors! ours came out beautifully. poppyseeds and tumeric to color the "cake" and nothing in the "icing" to keep it nice and creamy looking. quite a success. it's been hard not to try a bite, they look and smell so delicious! can't wait to see how they soap!