Such Treasures

The mold I use most often for soap-making is a 99 cent drawer tray. Its dimensions are 14″ by 6″. One batch fills it up.

Yesterday a friend came over to make soap with me. We not only used the drawer tray but experimented with filling a 3″ PVC pipe. Each mold received 1/2 a batch of castile soap (see recipe, similar to what we followed).

I lined the drawer tray with freezer paper, shiny side toward the soap, leaving the side walls uncovered. I folded the freezer paper to the underside and taped it down securely with masking tape. I rubbed olive oil over the freezer paper and the side walls. When the soap hardens, it is very simple to untape the paper from the underside of the tray and lift the soap right out.

My friend brought dried rose petals, which we chopped up in my food processor and spread out on the bottom of the drawer tray. Then we filled it with the hot process soap. What you’re seeing in the picture above is after the soap has hardened overnight. I worried that the rose petals would turn brown from the heat of the soap, and they did. So the result is not my favorite, but it was fun to try.

Here are those bars all cut up and trimmed smoothly. You can see the hint of rose petals under each bar.

The PVC pipe is not so easy a mold to use and I don’t have the hang of it yet. This was the 2nd time I tried it. First I cut a square of cardboard bigger than the circumference of the pipe. I masking-taped it very securely to the bottom, to prevent hot soap from seeping out. We put a circle of freezer paper, shiny side up, at the bottom of inside the pipe and greased it. Then we inserted a rectangle of freezer paper (shiny side toward the soap), just taller than the pipe and wide enough to make an overlapped circle inside the mold. We used oil and/or masking tape to make the overlapping edges of it adhere together instead of curling into the center of the PVC. We didn’t get it quite right, as you will see in the cut bars of soap below. Then we filled it with the hot soap.

This morning, I removed the cardboard bottom, peeled off the little circle of freezer paper and then pulled gently from the top to get the whole log of soap out of the mold. Once I trimmed the top and bottom of the log, I cut about 3/4″ slices, which resulted in these bars. See the indentations on the side? Those are from the freezer paper not lying flush against the sides of the pipe, causing inconsistencies in the soap’s shape.