Creative Chaos: Strawberry Shortcake Soap

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

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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