Great Cakes Soap Works, challenge #6.

Yes I am a bit slow off the mark, but, hey, it is better late than never. To really tell the truth, I have been putting off soaping, as I said in my last post. This last week I have been thinking how I really need to get back into it, so to get some inspiration I checked out some of my favourite soap blogs, and following some links to some other favourite ones that I had forgotten about and some new ones. As you do.... I felt like I wasted days, as you do.... Any way I re discovered Amy at Great cakes soap works and she has been running a weekly challenge. As you can tell I am 5 weeks behind but the beauty of this is that you can just jump in where you are.

So this weeks challenge is a Faux Funnel Pour. I do a similar pour for my Aussie Bush soap but for this I wanted to make it a bit different, I have been thinking about making a peppermint soap as I am totally out of peppermint, I wanted it to be green, naturally, so I went to the garden and picked some silverbeet to see how that would look, but one colour does not work with the fauz funnel pour, so I made two batches simultaneously, one with the silverbeet in the lye, and the other plain

The green colour started coming out instantly. This was very exciting for me.

And made the soap mix a really pretty grass green. I halved this pot and added charcoal to the other half.

I halved the plain batch and added alkanet root that had been infusing in oil for months to one half. To the other half I put in White Kaolin clay.

Here with the rest of the mess on my bench is the four pots with alkanet, kaolin clay, silverbeet and charcoal.

Sorry no photos of the actual pour but I am not very good at multi tasking. And the only person available to photograph was busy making our dinner, so that was a good enough excuse not to grab the camera, especially when I got to taste test the dinner before it went into the oven to bake for the afternoon. 

 The mix was a bit runnier than I was hoping for. But that meant that I had time to do a hanger swirl , again no photos. But it will be interesting to see when I cut it.

Now it is nicely tucked up beside our combustion stove, and as you can see,(or maybe not, the photo is worse than I thought it was)  that it is starting to gel. 

I ended up scenting it with 2 parts each of peppermint and lemon myrtle, and one part eucalyptus, or there abouts as my scales decided that weighing something that small was too hard. But the smell is great any way.

As you can see I have not got my most expensive mold for this batch, the reason for this is that most of my soap making stuff has been moved to the hut, but the hut is not quite ready for soap making to happen in yet,  so after giving it some thought I decided that this box would be just fine. I'll post photos of cut soap as soon as I get to cutting it.

Over all I am pretty happy with the end result, as I said earlier the mix was a bit runny so it swirled more than layered, but you can still see all four colours. The batch did get a bit too hot while it was gelling and there are a few small "volcano Pockets", but it looks pretty and smells great.

Where has the time gone...

I have been feeling really guilty about not updating this page, or my facebook page, and in the last couple of weeks I have had some questions about buying soap and some enquirys on the blog, so I thought that I had better get on here and update.

 We did go to the Seymour Alternative Farming Expo, somewhere there are some photos. In February just after the Seymour Expo we were invited to take part in the "Tallangatta Expo" which was a bringing together of all the Towong Shire's artisans, there was a huge array of handmade goods, from icecream to wooden chopping boards. We have had our regular farmers markets and for the first time there is talk of them going through winter.

But mostly I have been busy at home and on the farm, our vegetable garden produced a bumper crop of tomatoes, our apple and pear trees did not want to be out done by tomatoes, so we got heaps of apples and pears, not to mention the chillies, blackberries, basil, peas, beans and of course it all seemed to come at once. So I have been busy freezing, pickling, and bottling the produce.

We have dealt with floods again, thankfully we live in the hills and the floods come and go pretty quickly. My heart goes out to all those down stream who get inundated with the accumulated flood waters that hang around for weeks and months.

 We have also been busy fixing up our "hut" which is a cabin that we built about 10 years ago, it has been a spare room for guests, it was our temporary accommodation for a couple of months when we moved back here from the dairy farm, we always wanted to make it into a B&B. But lately our plans have taken a redirection, which they are often apt to do. As the soap making is out growing the laundry cupboard, kitchen and dining room we decided that we should make the hut the soap making centre. So the floors got sanded and sealed, the kitchen and laundry areas got tiled. Now we just need to put the sink and stove back, add a bench and a washing machine and the hut soap making centre is all ready to go. There will be a proper blog post about this soon as I will be starting to advertise it a bit more, we are hoping to have tea and coffee facilities and a few other items to make an interesting little shop.

 In the midst of all this I have made a batch of goats milk and honey castile soap, and learned to make liquid soap thanks to a very informative soap queen video and ebook. I just picked up another 10 litres of our beautiful snowy mountains olive oil. So I am hoping that this week I will be restocking heaps of soap.

Upper Murray Farmers Market

Today was the Farmers Market, over all the day was pretty quiet, a couple of new faces and lots of old ones. As always it was good to catch up with people we haven't seen since the last market. Ayala decided to get busy and cook nougat, coconut ice, rocky road and fudge. Kath picked heaps of blackberries, but had another stall at the other end of the park where the Arts Upper Murray group were having a craft market. Kath did get some time to take a few photos, but as she felt a bit conspicuous she took them from a distance.

Mary Grant and a yummy range of jams, pickles and sauces

Tom and Thea Newton from Tandara Gardens with a range of trees and shrubs

Fresh meat from Trevor and Sarah Klippel of Sugarloaf Herefords

The BBQ

Mt Mittamatite Bites

Looking up the park to the free range eggs and Lou Curven with her lip balms and body butters.

CWA ladies with cakes and jams

Jennifer Fennell with her photocards

Katherines sewing

Bonita Nicholas with lots of crafty things

The next market is on the Monday of the long weekend in March. It is all set to be a big weekend in town with the Towong races on the Saturday. Hopefully we will see lots of new faces at the market on the Monday before everybody leaves town.

It's not all about soap

Soap making has taken a back seat this last month, although I have made some liquid soap, more about that in another post. I currently have the best vegetable garden I have ever had, the tomatoes are ripening, we have beans galore, the snow peas and other peas are producing really well, as are the chillis, carrots, and beetroot.The mizuna has been beautiful and we are still eating it although some of it is starting to go to seed. One thing we have an abundance of is basil, I only brought one punnet and at the time it didn't look like much, but it grew, and grew. Yesterday I wanted to make some of my "green gunge" which is a salad / vegetable dressing made with whatever herbs I can find in the garden, garlic, lemon juice or cider vinegar, and olive oil. So I went out looking for herbs and started at the basil, it had grown so much that I only picked basil. I brought it in and decided to freeze it. So here are the photos of how to freeze basil, or any other herb so that it is in an easily usable form when you want a hit of fresh summer herbs sometime during winter. 

This is how much basil I picked, the red container is a 3.5lt

Chop it up, as fine or as rough as you like.

stuff it into ice cube trays.

When it is all stuffed in, fill the trays up with water. This is how much  all that basil chopped  and squashed down to.
Freeze it, and be prepared for some strange comments. Especially if you have a guest for dinner and he brings ice cream.

The frozen basil the next day, ready to put into freezer bags. 

A word of warning, the basil will stain your ice cube trays, but there are worse things in life than basil flavoured ice cubes.

Now  when you are cooking a bolognaise, or a casserole, or soup, whatever. all you do is throw in a ice cube of herbs for a beautiful fresh hit of summer.

Trying out for the Brambleberry S.O.A.P Team

I have been watching the Brambleberry S.O.A.P team get chosen and followed them doing their testing for a couple of years, recently I started thinking that I would love to try and get on the team. Well they have just put out the feelers for the latest team, so here I am, trying to get picked for it. Not sure if they are into allowing international members, or more to the point are international members viable for such a team, but my theory is it doesn't hurt to try.

Although I use mostly essential oils in my soap, there are some fragrant oils that I just can't go past.

Fresh Snow has become a favourite of some of my customers, it has a fresh clean fragrance that has an "after scent" of baby powder, this one took a while for me to like.

Cranberry and Pomegranate however was instantly one I loved, but I love cranberries and pomegrantes any way, but  my customers generally don't like it, it is a very sweet smell, just like cranberry juice.

Rich Dark Chocolate is another standard in my oil stash, I always mix it with peppermint essential oil and cocoa to make choc peppermint, sorry I cant find any photos of that soap. Last time I sorted my oil stash, I thought I would make a jaffa soap with the chocolate fragrant oil and orange essential oil.

But my all time favoutite Brambleberry Fragrant oil would have to be Turkish Mocha, it smells just like a hot cup of spiced mocha, the soap is also a favourite of my customers, whether it be:

In a cupcake....

Or a Latte.....

Or another cupcake

Or just a plain cake of soap.


So to Anne-Marie and the rest of the Brambleberry team, thank you for a great site and all the teaching you give, and also for the great service, I am forever grateful for the extra work and personal service recently when I was having some difficulties with an order. Whether or not I am considered for the S.O.A.P team I have had fun doing this blog post.



Happy New Year

I have been so busy I can't believe how long it has been since I did a blog post, or even a facebook update. To add to the usual Christmas and New Year busyness we spent a week in Sydney, pre christmas, with our eldest and then she travelled home with us to spend the summer holidays, and then just after New Year a very dear friend of hers came to visit with her mother and 3 adorable kids, so that was a very busy week, showing them what life on a farm is like, we milked cows, rode horses, fed calves, saw chickens hatching, ate carrots straight out of the ground, and plums straight off the tree, patted the pig, swam in the creek, rode on the tractor and heaps of other things. They left on Wednesday and it was so sad to see them go, we had such a wonderful time with them. So in all the busyness of the past month soap making has taken a back seat. But I have managed to do some.

This is todays offering, Aussie Bush, an EO blend of Lemon Myrtle and Eucalyptus, coloured with Olive Leaf Powder, Chacoal and Tumeric

These ones look a bit "blah", but they are nicely going through their gel phase, so I took the photo and quickly covered them back up. Hopefully we'll get some photos of the cut soap in a few days.

This is one of the couple that I managed to sneak in during the busyness, no colour but scented with Orange and Cedarwood EO's.

Coffee cake, I have made this in cups and cupcakes before, but was feeling a bit lazy this day and although I did do some cupcakes as you can see at the bottom, I also poured the rest into a loaf tin and sliced it.

Below I poured it into the bee mould, not sure yet if I will cut it into 6 full sized bars or 9 guest size bars.

Did you know that the coffe grounds in the soap not only are a great exfoliator, but are also a great odour remover.

We'll be at the Upper Murray Farmers Market tomorrow, maybe I'll remember to take a camera.

I hope you all have a wonderful, happy and healthy new year.

Long Overdue Photos

I gave myself a fright today. I realized that it is only 3 days till the next farmers market, and that I had not put any photos up of the latest soaps that I had made, so seeing as the boys are busy fixing my car and don't want tea yet I will make the most of the few spare minutes. So I grabbed Kaths camera and a few bars of soap and went out to our rusty old stove that is now a garden ornament.

Morrocan Spice. This is a remake, I wasn't totally happy with about half of the bars in the last batch, so the best thing to do with them is grate them up, make another batch and add the gratings. This is scented with orange and cinnamon, and has almond meal and yoghurt.

Vanilla, same again, I wasn't really happy with the previous batch of vanilla as I had used an essential oil, or in the case of vanilla it is an oleoresin, it really smelt like nothing, so I cubed it and made a batch of vanilla with a fragrant oil and added the cubes for interest.

This one is new, and it is very limited. Cranberry and Pomegranite. If you read my last post about my Aussie Soap Supplies order you will know that they gave me this as a free gift for spending so much money. As it was only a small bottle, I could only make a small batch, but it smells so yummy, just like cranberry juice. I am thinking that it will be a popular one, but I am often wrong in thinking what will be popular or not.

Rose Castile, this one was a really popular, so I had to make it again. Pure olive oil, rose geranium essential oil, and rose clay.

Summer Garden, another really popular one. Scented with rose geranium, lavender and lime essential oils. How do you like the orange colour, that was done with a paprika infused olive oil. I was so excited to see how bright the colour came out.