new recipe - vanilla pear swirl deer tallow soap
Ok, so I'm moving soon, so I wanted to make one last batch of soap before I pack up all the gear and put it away. I have a bunch of deer and bison tallow that I got at last year's Ohio-Kentuckiana Gathering and hadn't tried yet, so I decided to use a pound of the deer tallow in this batch. I've used deer tallow soap before, and it's very silky. This is only the second non-vegetarian batch of soap I've ever made (my first batch was a lard base, which I didn't actually like all that much. Good thing I'm stubborn. :-)

So, here's the recipe:

16 oz. deer tallow
16 oz. grapeseed oil
8 oz. coconut oil
2 oz. avocado oil
8 oz. olive oil

10 oz. cold water
7 oz. NaOH
1 oz. sodium lactate
Pinch silk

1.6 oz powdered goatsmilk
3 oz. cold water

2.4 oz. Sweetcakes Vanilla Pear FO
1 T. gold mica
1/2 T jade mica

--
Melt oils together and let cool to just above room temperature. Add gold mica.
Dissolve NaOH in cold water, add silk. When silk is dissolved, add sodium lactate. Let cool to just above room temperature.
Mix water into goatsmilk powder slowly (to prevent lumps). Put in freezer to turn slushy.
When oils and lye are cool, and goatsmilk is slushy, combine the goatsmilk into the lye, and mix the lye into the oils.
at a light trace, separate about half the traced soap into another bowl, and about half a cup into a mixing cup. first, mix the jade mica into the mixing bowl soap, so that you have a tiny amount of intensely green soap. then into the second bowl, add the FO slowly to avoid trace accelleration. when trace is thick pudding, dump the soap from the first container in along the side of the second bowl -- do not mix! then dump the green soap in the middle of the bowl. pour this into your mold. if it all works out right, you'll end up with a cream and brown swirled soap with veins of green mica throughout.

now, in practice, i'm not sure if this is going to work out right. the unfragranced (cream) half of the main soap was certainly a pudding trace, but adding the FO knocked the other half down to a light trace, even after i hit it with the stick blender. and the green soap was very thick, so i'm not sure how it'll turn out -- in the middle of the log, there's definitely a lot of it in one section.

put the pot and bowl in my oven overnight to warm/saponify, so they'll be soapy and easy to wash today... of course that had the side effect of making my kitchen smell fabulous, like vanilla pear. :) you know, the pilot light is the great unsung hero of home fragrancing...

we'll see how it turns out. i'll post photos if it looks at all interesting!