dancing in the kitchen

Life is surreal just now. All offspring and one husband are away travelling the world. I am rather enjoying the silent house. I think I am a hermit at heart. I do of course still have my job but I am off mothering duty and all of a sudden, the days seem so much longer. I start working at 7 and finish by 3. Hours of peace and quiet, perfect. I am keeping myself busy mostly with fun stuff but have also done some perfunctory cleaning. It is quite tidy of course without only one not terribly messy person.

I love to make soap but with five persons milling about the kitchen and crumbs everywhere it can be a bit hectic. I made my first batch when the door handle was still warm from Sam's touch. He was the last to leave. I have been building up to this moment of uninterrupted soap-making for weeks, watching swirling tutorials, pondering colour combinations and swooning over fragrance oils. I have now tried three UK suppliers of fragrance oils. Don't bother, none of them come anywhere close to Brambleberry fragrances. These are superb. Well at least the clean ones that I have tried are, the ones where they name elicits and memory of the scent. They do sell weird stuff like "Baby's breath". I don't think I fancy a wash with sour milk burp fragranced soap, do you?. You can also buy "Alien allure" (Mr Spock's pheromones?) and "Blue man". Really.

However, Brambleberry's Lily of the Valley (my favourite) is unsurpassed. I think the suppliers here make more complex blends but I don't care for that. If it says Lily of the Valley on the tin, I want it to smell like the flowers in my neighbours front garden in spring not some soapy flowery concoction with a note of Lily of the Valley that makes the back of my throat tingle when taking a sniff. I am not only a hermit at heart but also a purist! Or maybe a snob, who knows? Anyway, you can get the fragrance oils from the Dutch supplier You Wish Soap, saving on postage and import duty that incur when ordering from Brambleberry (USA). Note to self: must do some stockpiling before next March....

One divider still in place. Soap almost too thick to work with at this point.

Still, I tried!

Cutting the loaf into four chunks. The cut side looks quite cool

Cutting the first chunk in half through the middle (between top and bottom)...

and the second chunk...

then the second chunk....

and finally, the last one

I have a new mould for soap. It is a simple silicone mould like any old bread loaf tin but I bought inserts for it to pour different colours in sections. This has been on my wish list for four years but nobody thought I might actually want it (because it looks so boring).

I have not really made any swirly soaps and I spent some time looking up recipes that would amenable to playing with colours and patterns. Soap can get thick very quickly depending on the oils and fragrance used. I decided on a recipe that uses 30% olive oil, 20% coconut oil, 25% palm oil and 25% rapeseed oil. US readers might know that latter as Canola oil. Olive oil and rapeseed oil are liquid and a higher proportion of liquid oils slows down the chemical reaction. No, I don't know why. All but the palm oil are from Tesco, offsetting the expensive fragrance. I found ancient palm oil in a hidden drawer and it didn't smell rancid. Palm oil helps to make the soap bars quite hard, which makes them last longer.

For my first batch, I used three colours and Lily of the Valley fragrance. I wish I had looked at my soap making notes or at least dug up some long buried memories of using this fragrance before. It speeds up the saponification a little. I was feeling all chilled and happy, skipping a bit here and there but all of a sudden, the liquid turned to gloop. It was a bit of a faff spooning all the colours into the thin lengthwise sections. I thought the mixture was too thick to make swirls but I figured if it didn't work I would have a somewhat stripy soap, which is quite cool, too. I dragged the back of a spoon through the mixture in a Taiwanese swirl pattern (google it for some amazing examples). It was a bit like parting the Red Sea and I had to bash the mould quite hard onto the worktop to close the drag lines.

Waiting for the soap to fully set was trying my patience. It gets very hot first and then slowly cools down and hardens enough to cut. I knew from watching dozens of videos on YouTube that I could not just cut slices as one would cut a loaf of bread with this type of pattern. I cut the loaf into four large slices and then turned each on its side and cut them in half. Isn't the result surprising? They are a bit rough around the edges but I am happy with that. Considering that I was working with soap that had the texture of cold mashed potato, the bars look rather beautiful.

Thus emboldened I went on to make another batch, this time with four colours and Yuzu fragrance, and an audiobook in my ears (Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means). I'll spare you the details but I will say that Yuzu fragrance behaved far better and the swirling was easier. I really love the result but next time I shall be a bit more vigorous with my spoon.

Now I have to wait a few weeks before I can use a bar. In the meantime, I might mike one more soap with purples and blues.... some days left to play. I might have to get that Blue Man fragrance after all :-)

Jack had his stitches removed on Tuesday. He was pleased to be able to fit through the cat flap again and unfortunately went on another squirrel hunt. I think that squirrel is teasing him! Yes, the wound opened up again where the original gap was largest. He now has two staples, a brand new cone (having broken the last one) and a bruised ego. He is sleeping at my feet, dreaming of a cone free live with squirrels dancing around him.

I'll be back with some more holiday photos soon. It seems such a long time ago now. Thanks for visiting. Hello to new visitors, too. I hope you like it here. Cx