All is not sunshine and roses at Great Cakes Soapworks – the batch of Red Rock Canyon soap that I made several weeks ago has bits of undissolved lye throughout. Ugh. It was so beautiful too! I re-created the batch I made last year, only this time I was ready for things to move fast, [...]
Yep, it happened to me AGAIN. I made a double batch of Bye Bye Bugs Soap on Monday, and left out the olive oil. DOUBLE BATCH. It makes me ill just thinking about it. The worst part is that I ignored all the warning signs – and they were there! 1. I shouldn’t have been [...]
I had this great idea for a cherry soap using a sample of Black Cherry fragrance from FNWL, and some Cherry Garcia fragrance from Southern Soapers (which is sold out now). I really love the Black Cherry one the best, but I only had 0.15 ounces. The oil is completely clear and the fragrance is [...]
Antique Lilac Soap Remake, Part 1 Antique Lilac Soap Remake, Part 2 Here are a few bars from the small batch of soap I made yesterday with the embedded soap scraps: Before you go jumping up and down and raving about how great it turned out, I have to tell you something. I’m a big [...]
This is Part 2 in a short series on how I plan to salvage a batch of soft lilac soap. You can get yourself caught up on Part 1 if you need to. Today I made a small batch of soap with the soap shreds embedded in it to see how it would work. Using [...]
Remember this beautiful Antique Lilac Soap? I made it two months ago, and I’ve been waiting to see if it would harden. It was half of a batch that I split – one half was lye heavy and completely unusable, and this half ended up super-superfatted, so it was extra soft. And still is. While [...]
This is the story of two soaps. Both came from the same batch, but one is lye heavy and the other is superfatted. Soapmakers are scratching their heads right now wondering how this could be! I was confused at first, but it makes perfect sense now. Let me tell you how it happened. *cue music [...]
I tested a new soap fragrance today: Sweet Pea & Rhubarb. I never would have thought to pair up those scents myself, but it smells fantastic! The plan is to make some really cute Valentines Day soaps with it, but I wasn’t sure my methods were going to translate into the soap I had created [...]
This going to be somewhat of a teaser. No final reveal. Just a very strange behaving soap. I took what I knew about the Caramel Dip fragrance that I recently purchased, and attempted to create something special. The fragrance lacked pizazz coming out of the bottle, so added a bit of Green Apple and Brown [...]
The Clarifying Facial Soap has been in the Great Cakes Soapworks line almost since I started selling soap (made my first batch of it six years ago!). It’s a bit tricky to make since it likes to set up rock hard in a matter of minutes. There’s a fine line between getting the soap fully [...]
