Saturday, August 4, 2012

Ice Cream Soap


I'm always fascinated by the different ideas and designs that soapers come up with. So many amazing and talented people out there! I often wonder how they get their inspiration…do they picture the soap as soon as they smell the fragrance oil? Is it a colourful picture that catches their eye, that they imagine as a soap? My inspiration comes from a lot of different places, but I happen to also love baking and decorating cakes, so I end up getting a lot of my inspiration from different cakes and desserts that I make or see. I find that a lot of the skills and ideas that I use in cake decorating translate well over to my soaping; baking and soaping are basically the same process after all - making a batter and then scenting/flavouring the batter, cooking it, and decorating the end product!  

This soap was inspired by…yep, ice cream! And I wondered….since I'm making a soap that is inspired by ice cream, what would happen if I used ice cream IN the soap? After all, it's just one step beyond using milk in soap. We happened to have some vanilla ice cream on hand, so I decided to try it out!  I held back some of the water and added the melted ice cream at trace; it did seem to accelerate the soap a bit but didn't curdle and mixed in very nicely. The bottoms were a bit crumbly, I'm not sure if that was from the ice cream or not. It will be interesting to see how this soap is once it's cured. The chocolate portion is fragranced with dark chocolate and the pink is fragranced with fluffy pink candy.

It's funny, now that I look back over all of the soaps I've made the last couple of months, I'm realizing a common theme…food! Where does your inspiration come from?!


8 comments:

  1. Looks good, but I would never put ice cream in soap! :D There are two good reasons A) I have NEVER left over ice cream at home (just looooove ice cream) and B)I never by vanilla. Chunky Monkey could be a little too much in soap :D

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    1. Lol Kirpuu! I felt a little guilty using good ice cream in soap, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the sake of the art :D

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  2. Beautiful soap, Cee Gee! It looks good enough to eat. I probably never would have thought to use ice cream in soap, but it makes sense. I love to bake, too, and I've also thought that the processes of baking and soapmaking are similar. It seems like I usually get an idea for how to make a soap look and what colors to use after sniffing a fragrance oil. Sometimes, though, I'll have a particular technique in mind and then go searching for a fragrance oil to fit the technique. :)

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  3. Hi Jenny, thanks! Baking is definitely an art in itself, it is amazing how similar it is to soap making, I guess that is why we are drawn to both :) That's a great idea to match the technique to a fragrance oil, I've never thought to do that but it makes complete sense. Thanks for sharing that :)

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  4. Agh, I've been slacking with commenting! So let me make up for it here:

    As you know from the forums, I think this is a totally adorable idea and soap! I always want to try out alternative liquids and never really take the step other than goat and coconut milk (which I don't care for CM), but I did finally pick up some almond milk I will hopefully get around to this week!

    The cherry blossom is absolutely beautiful! That FO from BB is my bff coworker's favorite of mine, and I have made her quite a few MP soaps with it and keep promising her some CP cherry blossom, so I need to get on that too! (Perhaps with almond milk??)

    I've done oat milk only once and mixed it with my lye and it curdled a bit. I infused mine on the stove instead of the fridge though. I shall have to try your methods! What mold is that you used for that soap?

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  5. Thanks Laura, I appreciate your comments :) I love cherry blossom too, such a pretty scent! I think almond milk would be lovely with it. I haven't tried almond milk yet, but I would love to...please post your results if you try it!

    I followed Irena's suggestion for incorporating the oat milk, and it worked really well. I had no issues other than it thickening up quite quickly, but I was also using a new f.o., so it may very well have been that too. The mold I used for the oat milk soap is just a clear drawer organizer. I love using clear molds so that I can see what my swirl or layers looks like, I'm nosy that way...lol :p

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  6. Do you have any trouble unmolding? I used a clear one from BB when I first started making CP, two loaves successfully, then one got so stuck that I had to cut it out and chunk the mold. :(

    BB's silicone loaf molds are pretty see-thru, and I like that about them too. :)

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  7. I used to have a lot of trouble unmolding and had to put them in the freezer to get them out nicely :( However, since I started using sodium lactate, they pop out easily and are ready to cut after only 12 hours, which is way faster than I'm used to :)

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