This time of year, as the garden settles down and the weather cools, I always start the soap makin’!  Anyone who receives holiday gifts from me can pretty much expect a bar of soap. 🙂

This year, I thought I’d deviate from my tried and true recipe and experiment with a new one I found.  It sounded so delicious!!  Pumpkin & Coconut Milk Salt Bar…. like the kind of soap you’d find at a high end spa, or something like that.  Well, I don’t know what I did wrong with it, but it turned out a flop.  When I tried to cut it, it just broke into crumbly pieces.

It still smells delicious.  Kaia recommended we break it up and put it into little jars, with ribbons and little spoons, so that people could using it as a soapy salt scrub.  She’s my resourceful little one!

So, feeling the need to redeem myself and went back to my favorite recipe.  We whipped up a batch of Candy Cane soap (using peppermint and spearmint essential oils). But, this time, just before pouring it into the mold, I took out two cups of soap and colored it.  Into one cup of soap, I added a tablespoon of madder root powder.  In another cup I added 2 teaspoons of Spirulina powder.  The result was red and green…

These were put into squirt bottles.  Once I poured the main soap into the mold, we used the squirt bottles to make dots with the colors.

Then, we dragged a bamboo skewer through the dots to create hearts.

We made a double batch and poured the extra into a Tupperware.

Then, with the small amount of the colored soap we had left over, we poured it into silicone molds and swirled it up!

Usually, this recipe has cured enough in 24 hours that you can pop it out of its mold and cut it.  Not this time.  Even after 3 days it still felt like modeling clay.  I ruined a few pieces just trying to get them out of the molds.  I even stuck it in the freezer to try to harden it up.  What is it with me and soap these days??!!  So frustrating!

Anyhoo,  I still ended up with some pretty nice soap.  I love how the hearts turned out.  If I try it again, I think I’ll make the circles smaller so that there are more hearts on each soap.  I just hope it finishes hardening up fully!