Is something organic if it is shipped across the country? What about the fuel that is used and how that affects our environment, not to mention the freshness of the food and a myriad of other factors. Over the last few years i have been reading everything i can get my hands on to help me answer these and other questions so sit back, relax and explore where my quest has taken me thus far.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Pumpkin Soap


Hello all you ghosties and ghouls.  I hope everyone has fun times planned for this devilish evening.  To kick off my Halloween celebration I reinvented one (my first and only so far) of my home made soaps into another soap.  This is a process called re-batching, literally remaking the batch.  I wanted to do this because the soap is made with all-natural oils, has a great lather and leaves my hands feeling "silky and smooth" but it was uglier than a goblin's big toe.  

To make a re-batch, I surfed around the net and came up with sort of a hybrid recipe which I will list below.


6.2 oz. ugly soap, I chopped it up in the food processor
2 oz frozen goats milk (yes i keep frozen goats milk in my freezer because, you never know when you will have a goating emergency)
1 oz avocado oil
.5 oz beeswax, I have seen that many experienced soapers like to add this to their recipes so I thought what the heck

Directions:
Place all the above ingredients in a double boiler and let it go slow and low for approximately 2 hours I used a 4C Pyrex measuring cup and a pot, I had to replenish the water twice, stir regurarly to help remove the lumps.  Because i have never done this before I was not sure what to expect and look for or wait for so once the consistency stopped developing (after about 2 hours in this case) I removed the Pyrex cup from the pot and added the below ingredients.


 12 drops of liquid orange (it is as bright as a hazmat suit I swear)
6 ml Pumpkin Spice essential oil
1 ml Cinnamon Sugar essential oil


I tried to use my hand blender but it was pretty ineffective so I went back to stirring by hand with a spatula.  The soap started to harden so I put it back into the pot and let it re-soften.  While that was going on I lightly sprayed my pumpkin molds with some olive oil, I thought it would help to get them out when they were ready.  With the Pyrex cup still in the pot and the flame still on low I started to scoop the soap out and into the pumpkin molds, I did this slowly and tried to push as much soap into the molds to help with getting the air bubbles out and to get the soap into the cracks and crevices of the little molds.  once that was all done, I scraped the top to remove any excess (which I formed into a little ball, no sense in wasting) and then popped them into the freezer. 


I left them in the freezer for about 45 minutes and just pulled them out, I may not have needed the olive oil I found that simply squeezing the sides worked great, they just popped out.  While they are not perfect little pumpkins, they are  my little pumpkins and totally usable, besides now my whole kitchen smells like pumpkin pie!


The finished product!  So they are a little deformed, they are pumpkins!

Have a SPOOKTACULAR evening!!!!


~CM





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