What soapy thing have you done today?

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Ok, I may have freaked out prematurely. My candy corn blob swirl actually looks pretty good!
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I wrapped and labeled a special order for a friend who bought a loaf. Also, Mrs. Zing goes camping this weekend with her homies and I wrapped and labeled some gifts for them as well. Completely bonkers day at work so am desperately keeping my hands busy to distract myself. Wine helps too.

Ok, I may have freaked out prematurely. My candy corn blob swirl actually looks pretty good!View attachment 60700
Heck yeah it looks good! Hot fudge hot caramel sundae anyone?!
 
A real OT Peche de Vigne soap! The FO smells wonderful, just like peach, and not overbearing at 5%. I love the size of the mold, but need to get the hang of working within the “confined” area, especially with pipe dividers. I made a bit of a mess with drips and drops, but I think it turned out okay. The green will likely be a bit less olive if it morphs back to the planned color.

View attachment 60676
This is beautiful. I would love to know what colour mica you used for the pink. I am having a very hard time finding a beautiful pink like this.
 
Gorgeous! Tell me more - is it done in a slab mold? Or in the that mold behind the soap there? I want to try!
I made it in a log mold I bought on Amazon. I used only two of the 3 dividers. This set up gave me three equal sections to pour soap batter. The swirl was done with the fat end of a chopstick in a figure 8 pattern, but it reminds me of the really loopy Ls I used to scrawl down the side of my notebooks when I was bored in class. 😊. I think it’s important to use a fatter tool for the swirl to get the soap to move well. My swirls were about an inch apart and the loops were about an inch wide, almost a circle on each side. There is an illustration of the swirl in this NZ soapers blog. The mantra bars are cut horizontally. With this 10” mold I cut two layers of five bars and used the top layer to cut guest soap. Each bar is 2.75” long x 2” tall x 1” thick. The bars are a little smaller than my usual bars, but they fit very nicely in the hand!
6445CDD3-ADB0-427C-80BA-9B0556177CEC.jpeg
 
Baking a cake (right now in the oven), I'm a bit worried that the fatty acid profile might be a bit unbalanced, and also that I missed a great opportunity to practice swirling (drop swirl, ombré, spoon swirl) 🤪
Yeah but at least you're onto the CPOPping method.
 
This is beautiful. I would love to know what colour mica you used for the pink. I am having a very hard time finding a beautiful pink like this.
Thank you! For 160 g of batter, I used 1/4 tsp Nurture’s Amaranth Pink mixed with a pinch (1/32 tsp?) of their Orange Vibrance and some Glamour Pink from Micas and More to get the darkest pink. I can’t tell you exactly how much of the Glamour Pink I used because I adjusted by eye. It was close to what I used for the orange. For a lighter pink I started with 1/8 tsp of Amaranth Pink for the same amount of soap, less of the orange and added some TD, but none of the Glamour Pink. When I realized that I needed a little more pink soap I mixed the last bits of mica from the mixing cups into batter and added additional TD to get the lightest shade of pink.

P.S. I also really like Nurture’s Love Song.
 
I did my first woodgrain pour. It's been on the soap bucket list for a few years, so it was time to give it a go. I started pouring at very thin trace, thinking it would be better when the batter got thicker toward the end. It didn't get thicker so at this point I'm just hoping my colors aren't completely muddled. 😲🤔🤪 My other learning - I split off too much of the batter for the colors - I should have had more base. It was fun though!
 
Soapy only in the sense that I used up the remainders of my cocoa butter for this … Yesterday, I had my probably longest chocolate making session ever. Oof. More than two hours of constant weighing, stirring, measuring temps, panicking to not exceed 32°C, scraping out the pot, rattling moulds, cleaning the tools, licking fingers etc.

And all this knowing that not a single bar of chocolate of this campaign will be enjoyable – It's kind of an assembly kit, with ingredients pre-dispersed into cocoa butter for quick combination into proper chocolate of various composition.
All in all I'm quite happy how everything turned out. Only one bar has settled in a problematic way, but everything will be molten up again anyway. Everything is so easy, now that all the annoying steps are done.

cbrest.jpg Left to right/bottom: concentrates of cocoa, milk powder, powdered sugar, carob.

cbrest_bloom.jpg Beautiful swirls to look at, but chocolatier's nightmare: fat bloom (temps were probably 1°C too low when I poured, and/or the spatula wasn't clean).

In the end, I treated myself to the remainders dispersed into hot milk for the probably best hot chocolate of my life, lol. Now I can start composing chocolate again, and I eventually have the space left for ordering more cocoa butter!
 
Thank you! For 160 g of batter, I used 1/4 tsp Nurture’s Amaranth Pink mixed with a pinch (1/32 tsp?) of their Orange Vibrance and some Glamour Pink from Micas and More to get the darkest pink. I can’t tell you exactly how much of the Glamour Pink I used because I adjusted by eye. It was close to what I used for the orange. For a lighter pink I started with 1/8 tsp of Amaranth Pink for the same amount of soap, less of the orange and added some TD, but none of the Glamour Pink. When I realized that I needed a little more pink soap I mixed the last bits of mica from the mixing cups into batter and added additional TD to get the lightest shade of pink.

P.S. I also really like Nurture’s Love Song.

Thank you so much. That helps immensely.
 

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