A Little Food & Drink Anyone?

This month's challenge from Amy Warden's Soap Challenge Club was to incorporate food and drink into your soap recipe.  I have been looking at a few different projects with this very thing in mind, so this challenge was aptly timed for me.

One of the project soaps I was thinking of was using various juices.  A company in Boulder called Wonder Press was interested in having some of their unique juices made into soap, and I was curious how they would turn out and if the colors would survive the process.  So, here I have the initial experimental results.

So, this brilliantly colored juice contains spirulina, and I was really hoping for the color to come through in the final soap.  However, this juice used as 100% of the liquid component resulted in the top left bar - a boring, natural colored soap which emitted no scent.  I added my own algae and supplemented with essential oils that mimicked the juice, and the result is directly to the right of the first.

The middle two soaps were made with a charcoal thyme lemonade, a very intriguing combination.  The star shape, middle left, was the juice straight up.  No added charcoal or fragrance.  The color actually ended up similar to what I was hoping for with the first juice, but still no scent.  On the right, I added charcoal and essential oils to create something more representative of the juice it originated from.

And, the bottom left soap (there actually was no bottom right...) was made from some juice I had in the fridge.  It was an Odwalla Berries Gomega, which is technically a smoothie - made from the puree and juice of a combination of fruit and berries.  The final soap turned a light brown color, so as I expected, the purple did not come through.  However, and interesting finding was that it did smell faintly of berries, making this a natural way to obtain a berry scented soap.

Now, on to the soap that i entered into the soap challenge.  The hand therapist, whom I saw several times a week after my carpal tunnel surgery, actually owns a brewery out east of where I live.  During my hand massaging sessions, we had talked about possibly making some soap from his beers.  It never came to fruition, as the seasons and timing weren't right, but I have kept this on my mind ever since.  So....I headed over to Echo Brewing in Erie, CO and picked up some beer. 

Varieties that caught my eye for soap making were a Blackberry Wit, a Peach Pale Ale and a Hefeweizen with hints of banana and clove.  So, I brought them home, boiled the alcohol out and froze them into ice cubes.  I have made beer soap in the past, using Left Hand Brewery's Milk Stout (my favorite...).  It made a nice dark bar of soap with a wonderful lather.  Many of my customers have commented on the luxuriousness of this soap, and I agree, it's a beautiful bar.  However, I have wondered what a bar would be like with a lighter, hoppier beer and have been wanting to make one for years.  Now was my chance!

So, this bar was made with using the beer as 100% of my liquid component.  The lye mixture was very dark, making me think that there wasn't any way of getting around the dark color with a beer soap.  I mixed the beer/lye mixture into the oils and brought it to trace.  I then added 1/8th of the mass of the oils (170 g) pureed banana to the batter.  I poured a layer of soap, sprinkled with some clove powder to give a thin line effect and repeated, finishing with a light powdering of clove powder on the very top.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well these bars turned out.  The color is perfect for a Banana Clove feel, and the natural scent (nothing added!) is a strange combination of beer, banana and clove. 

I'm not finished with these experiments....