Soap Making - Adding Colour

A bar of handmade soap is always awesome but you can add your own twist to it with colour. 

Make any recipe you like and once you achieve trace, you are ready for colour. You already know Soap Making - The Basics, so let's go!

You can add colour a few different ways. 

You can use hard white oils (lard and coconut, for example) to create a white bar of finished soap. Using olive oil can add a hint of green, canola and corn oil give a more beige kinda colour.

 Instead of using just distilled water, you could use milk, green tea, or coffee. 

And once you achieve trace you can add in colour using food grade dyes, cosmetics, micas, or pigments. 

For a simple swirled or layered look separate your soap into two halves. 

This is my Pink Lemonade soap, so I am making it half yellow and half pink. 

I added yellow food colouring and gold eye shadow to one half. The food colouring is from the grocery store and the eye shadow I found at the dollar store. 

Hard to tell in these photos but it turned out a nice yellow, with a pretty shimmer.

To the other half I added red food colouring and pink eye shadow.

Now half is yellow and half is pink. 

Pour in a thin layer of pink.

Pour yellow on top. Sorry for the blurry action shot!

Then pink again.

Then yellow, pink, yellow, until all the soap is in the mold layer by layer. 

If you want to half the result look layered just leave it as this. It will look great and you will see the distinct layers of colour when you cut the soap. 

But you can swirl it together a bit too. Use a chopstick, or a spoon handle and gently draw S shapes through the soap, or draw lines across it, or whatever you want. Don't swirl to much or the distinct colours will be lost. 

I did the lines first then did the S curves. 

I gently tapped the top with my fingers to add a texture to the top of the soap.

Here it is 24 hours later. 

Now cut into bars, you can see the layer pattern of the pink and yellow and a bit of swirl that I did. 

I separated this batch in half and made half green sparkle, half red sparkle. First get to thick trace, this ensures that the sparkles will stay suspended and not all sink to the bottom. 

Now add the green and red sparkles.

Layer it and gently swirl!

Another option Adding Texture
~Jess

Soap Making - The Basics

The first rule of Soap Making Club is - You do not talk about Soap Making Club. 

The second rule is - You do not talk about Soap Making Club. 

Third rule is...

Just kidding, it's kind of like Fight Club but without the fighting. 

Please tell me you've seen that movie and know what I am talking about! It's the only soap making movie out there!

Last summer I bought some handmade soap while we were on vacation and I really liked it. Months later it was all gone and unfortunately I wasn't able to just go get some more. I thought maybe I could try and make my own soap, I read a few books and a few blogs and I got started.

 Since then I have made many batches in different colours and fragrances. 

Have you ever wanted to make some soap? Here are the basics...

You will need safety gear, apron, gloves, goggles. 

A scale, stick blender, thermometer, containers, spatula, and mold. For the mold, use an empty 2 L milk jug, a yogurt container, a Pringles can, or a silicone one. It doesn't matter. Line the recycled containers with parchment paper, or use a non-stick oil spray. You do not need to line the silicone molds.

Ingredients include oil, lye, and water. That's it!

You can use any oil and any mix of oils. I started with basic grocery store oils - canola, coconut, olive, vegetable shortening, lard. These oils are easy to find and not too expensive. The water is distilled, just to ensure it doesn't contain any impurities. The lye (sodium hydroxide) can be hard to find, check at home improvement stores or online.

The entire process takes about an hour. Find some time that you won't be disturbed - no kids, no pets. The process can be dangerous if not done carefully and certainly should not be done with children. Please read and follow all caution info on the lye crystals!

First step is to put on your safety gear. Wear this gear for the entire process!

Then, weigh out all ingredients. I put the oils together and keep the lye and water separate. I use a large measuring cup for the water, it doesn't come close to being full, but this way there is lots of safety room for the chemical reaction that will take place. 

Take the lye and water outside if you can, if you can't put on the fan or open a window. The mixing of lye and water will start a chemical reaction that creates a lot of heat and nasty fumes.

Do not breathe in these fumes! 

OK? Ready? Slowly and carefully add the lye crystals to the water. Do NOT add the water to the lye, it will likely splash or overflow and could burn you. Only ever add the crystals into the water. 

Stir gently. It will be cloudy and frothy and VERY hot. Stir until all crystals are dissolved. Then let it cool down. 

If you want to chill the solution a bit faster, place it in the sink in an ice water bath. 

Mix the oils and the lye solution together when they are roughly the same temperature. You can wait until the lye solution reaches room temperature and then matches your oils, or you can heat the oil to match the lye solution. Try using the microwave in short 30 second intervals or put all the oils in a pot on the stove and gently heat. 

I have done both ways, you have to wait a long time for the lye solution to cool enough, but be patient.

I prefer to heat the oils a bit, especially if I use oils that are solid at room temperature (like lard and coconut oil). Heat the oils to about 110-120 F and let the lye cool to about the same. 

Once they are roughly the same temperature, you can slowly and carefully pour the lye solution into the oil. 

The reaction will begin immediately, the clear oils will become cloudy and creamy looking. 

Use a stick blender to mix the two together. You will have to mix and mix! It can take up to 25 min to reach "trace" for some recipes. Trace is achieved when the mixture leaves a "trace" when you pull the blender out. Like when you can see it is thick enough that it doesn't just mix right back in. It will kind of look like pudding or a thin custard. 

Here is is starting to thicken up. Keep mixing!

See how the drips off the blender just disappear?

Here is is thick enough that the drips are still visible. This has reached "trace". 

Now pour this mixture into a mold. You can wrap the mold in an old towel or blanket for added insulation. Now, just leave it for 24 hours. In this time the chemicals of the oils, water, and lye will react and create soap!

The next day, remove the soap from the mold and cut it into bars. Cut whatever size and shape you want. 

This soap is now safe to use, but will only get better with time. Leave the bars of soap to dry out for 4 to 6 weeks or longer. The water will evaporate out and leave you with a solid, long lasting bar of handmade soap.
~Jess

 Up next Adding Colour!

Simple Sugared Pecans

There are several recipes available for "easy" sugared pecans, but this method is even easier than most of those! Ingredients consist of some pecans and brown sugar. 

For the 100 gram package of pecans, I used 1/2 cup of brown sugar and 1/2 cup water. You really just need enough water to dissolve the sugar. Less is better because you're going to have to boil it all away again anyway.

First, I dissolve the brown sugar in the water and then boil it on the stove for about 5 minutes to start reducing. It should start looking a little thicker, but you're going to want it to be able to coat the pecans still.

Put the pecans in a microwave safe container. I like this casserole dish as it has a big flat bottom. (As an interesting tidbit, I very rarely ever make an actual casserole. I think this dish gets used for these pecans or a seven layer dip more often than something like lasagne.)

Pour the sugar water on the pecans and stir to coat them. Then they go into the microwave to continue boiling away the water. You can start with setting the microwave to two minutes at a time. You'll gradually see the water disappearing. Make sure to stir them every time so that you can make sure they're evenly coated.

Then there is going to be a point where you've got it down to syrup. The first time I tried this I stopped here because I thought they were done, but they aren't. You're getting there, but keep going!

At this point, I start going with shorter stints in the microwave, only a minute at a time. I do keep the pecans spread out for cooking, I just pushed them aside for the pictures so you could see how the sugar part changes.

Here it's still quite sticky syrup. The gob at the top is me trying to scrape it off my stirring spoon.

In this one, it's sugar crystals in the centre of the dish, but syrupy around the outside now. Cut the microwave time down to 30 seconds each so that you easily monitor the progress.

Then you get to sugar crystals in the dish, but the pecans themselves are still a bit sticky. (The "hole" in the sugar layer on the dish is from where I scraped it up into a pile so you could see it. Not sure it comes through that well in the pictures.)

At this point, I microwave in 15 seconds at a time so that you can be sure they're done but you don't go too far and end up burning the pecans. You can see now that it's sugar crystals on the pecans and they look dry, they aren't shiny anymore like the picture above.

You can serve these as candies as they are. Not sure how many I "sample" during the process, but I certainly end up with less than the 100 grams I start with. Just be careful not to burn your tongue :)

But they go really well on a salad. Spring greens, red onion, strawberries, feta cheese, and shrimp with a sweet dressing (like poppy seed or raspberry vinaigrette).

If there are any leftovers, I store them in an airtight container in the freezer as lots of sites say they'll stay fresh for up to a year this way.

Enjoy!
~Lisa