Strawberry Shortcake Soap

Finished Bars

I am fascinated by how many fresh ingredients that you can use in soap.  It is truly amazing.  In this case I wanted to make a soap with strawberries.  I wanted to make a strawberry shortcake soap.

Mixing the cream colored soap

I started by mashing up five ounces of strawberries and setting them aside.  Next I measured and mixed the lye water reserving 5 ounces of water for the strawberry puree.  This keeps the water content in the soap from being too high.  I also added a pinch of silk to the lye water.  My next step was to weight out the oils for this recipe.

Piped Bars

After everything was measured out, I blended the oils together to make sure that all of the clumps of cold oils were broken up.  I added the lye water to the oils and blended to a very light trace, it may have even been just a good emulsification.  I was going to blend them more so this was a reasonable stage.  I poured off half of the batch into a separate bowl.  To one bowl I added the strawberry puree and a bit of rosehip oil.  To the other bowl I added some zinc oxide mixed with a little oil.  I was not looking for white just a nice cream.

I started blending the bowl with the cream first to a light trace.  I left the seeds in the puree so I had to blend that bowl second.  I poured the strawberry puree mixture into the cream mixture for a in the pot swirl.  I poured this into my sample bar mold 1 1/2 inches deep.  Next I poured the rest of the soap into a 9 X 9 square silicone pan.  After the soap was solid enough to come out of the pan, I puled it out and cut it into squares.  After cutting the squares I then cut them in half height wise.

Sample Bars uncut

After a couple of days, I mixed up a small batch of soap coloring all of the soap a soft cream.  I measured out everything and mixed the lye with the water and silk.  I mixed the zinc oxide and the fragrance oil with the oils before adding the lye water to the oils.  I scented the whole batch with strawberries and cream fragrance oil.  I blended the entire batch to a thick trace.  After lettting the soap sit for about 15 minutes, it was thick enough to pipe.

I started by piping in the bottom half of each piece and setting the top piece on the piped soap.  After giving the piped soap some time to set up, I piped soap on top of the top piece of soap.  So now I have a piped soap "sandwich."  Although I think that I should have cut the pieces a little differently, I think that the soap looks really nice.

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