Soap Challenge Week 3 - In The Mold

Hi All! It's challenge time again! I must say I'm loving this challenge business! Thank you so much Amy! It's so nice to have a goal to work towards each week and I'm learning something new with each one, which I bet was Amy's goal in the first place. This is only going to make us all better! I certainly don't need any more soap around here and so I had planned to quit soaping for a while. But I HAVE to do this so you know...the soap piles higher! :-)

The challenge for this week is to pipe soap. Now, I have done this before with some cupcakes. It was so long ago (almost two years) and long before I ever watched Karen with Eden's Secret pipe cupcakes over and over and over again. Here is the best looking one of the six I did in May 2010:


I feel like if I had attempted the cupcake again, that I would have done alright now. However, I don't care for the cupcake soap when it comes to use. They are so pretty and cute and fun but when it comes to using them, I don't really want to have to cut it in two pieces to actually use it. To me, that defeats the purpose of the work put into it. Not to mention that it has lots of bubbles and gaps and I prefer a smooth bar. But to each her own right?

I was still going to make cupcakes (it IS a challenge after all) but I didn't think I had the appropriate icing tip. You know, if you use a tip that doesn't make big ridges while piping, things can start looking a little...well, dog-like and gross. :-) Turns out I did have the right tip but by then I was downstairs and had my oils melted and my mind was already going in the loaf direction.

To this batch I added a bit of cream and made up my own scent blend of fruit loops fragrance and frosted lime cupcake fragrance. I originally was going to do mostly frosted lime cupcake but the fruit loops smelled so good that I made it the dominant fragrance in the mix. I poured my base plain as it will discolor (oh such a sad thing for fruit loops fragrance!) and mixed up five colors for the piped topping. All was going great and the soap in the bag looked so cool. I used pink, green, yellow, blue, and purple. It was like the best spoon swirl...only the soap was still in the bag.

Oh look! I figured out a snapshot from my video!



Once I began piping, I realized that my soap was blending too much and the blue and purple were overwhelming the batch. I continued on and I didn't get the color payoff but oh well! I don't get too caught up on such things. But I did learn that you must (and I'll have to try this sometime to find out for sure) add your colors to your bag in bigger amounts and not just spoon by spoon. The color has to squeeze through such a small opening. I would have rather had a pink star here and a green star there instead of the grayish tinge the stars took on.




I made some embeds with the extra soap...






See you Saturday ( I hope) for the cut!