I work at a grocery
store that likes to carry some of the more unusual sorts of foods and
drinks. It also loves to follow trends. One of the latest drink
trends, apparently, is maple water aka maple sap. Being a great lover
of maple syrup, and a curious soaper, I bought a litre carton, for
around $5.00 and brought it home with me. My soapmaking supplies is
sitting at Canada Post as I missed the delivery today so I left this
batch unscented. The fragrance oils I have at the moment are movers
and I wanted my soap to remain the consistency of water for my
design. Unless playing with a design like jaguar spots, or layers I
near always like to keep my soap batter ultra thin... It seems to
work for me so why not?
Knowing that maple
sap is full of sugar, I frozen a portion of the carton to use in
today's soap. I popped the necessary number of maple sap cubes into
my lye pitcher and slowly added my lye. The mixture turned a pale
cream. There was a faint tire (maple syrup taffy) scent as the lye
cooled. When my lye and oils felt about room temp, I mixed them
together. My temperatures might have been higher than I tend to
favour; we're having a freakish heatwave here in the Fraser Valley...
my poor rainforest is bone dry, so room temp is higher than normal.
In any case, my soap batter behaved as normal, no discolouration so
far as I could see and I managed to do an eight colour swirl.
Now I had had a
different vision for the swirl but I screwed up the order of my pour
and didn't use enough white. Still, rainbow soap is rainbow and it
has a faint sweet smell from the maple water, though I have my doubts
that it'll survive the cure. This soap did overheat, unsurprisely
given all the sugar in the sap. If I had insulated my soap, I never
do as I prefer to let the soap do what it wants, I'd likely have had
a big crack in my soap. Instead, it just as a dusty bubbly surface.
Next batch with this additive will be tossed into the freezer for an
hour to nip that in the bud.
So here are the
bars! I can't seem to cut in a straight line, and I cut it a little/
a lot soft, so there are defects, blah blah. You should see what I do
to a watermelon... Oiy.
Now it's been a couple of weeks since I made Sugar Mint and the discolouration from the vanilla has deepened and spread. It's so strong it's made a gradient affect within the white. The deep green is more ore less brown now and the original tan is a deep brown. It makes the white and the mint swirls all the more impressive. You can use vanilla stabilizer to slow the discolouration, or bleeding like you see in these bars, but it doesn't hold off discolouration for all that long and I choose to accept the discolouration as it comes... Brown soap is still pretty... right?
No comments:
Post a Comment